TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

This show, I hope, is enriching for you … because it’s enriching for me. I continually discover new voices, new poems, and new perspectives as I gather poems alongside our terrific producers. I draw on my own experiences as I write the episodes, but I also get to research references from the poems: ancient myths, scientific phenomena, word origins, and pop culture. And because poets are wildly creative, my search history is all over the place.

Research for today’s episode landed me at the intersection of pop culture and word origins. My question was, “What’s the history of the term thirst trap?” The internet did not disappoint.

I know what a thirst trap is — a social media post meant to make viewers desire the poster sexually. In short, a sexy selfie. It was first defined in Urban Dictionary, back in 2011. By now, this term related to selfie culture is in the Oxford English Dictionary. The phrase is a combination of the figurative use of “thirsty” — meaning craving attention — and the word “trap.” So, a picture that captures viewers’ attention. By 2018, “thirst trap” was being used in publications like the New York Times and GQ without explanation. By then, thanks to social media and dating apps like Tinder and Grindr, it was assumed by that point that everyone knew what a thirst trap was.

People post seductive selfies for all kinds of reasons. They might want validation in the forms of likes and comments. They might be single and hoping to meet someone online. They might be trying to build a following, or promote a product. Someone’s face or body is going to grab a lot more eyes on social media than text on a plain background. Which means we’re often attaching our bodies to our labor or art. Regardless of how you feel about this, it is, in a way, deeply intimate.

Or they might have just felt cute and confident. As my teens say, “Mom, it’s not always that deep.”

Today’s poem struck me because of the speaker’s vulnerability. Even flexing in the mirror, he can’t help but be reflective. The poem is that deep. And I’m awarding bonus points for a clever nod to Prufrock in a poem about a sexy selfie.

Thirst Trap
by Caleb Curtiss

For those 
experiences we cannot
express inwardly
no matter how clearly

their impression
appears in the mind’s eye:
a line unbroken
between its two points, not

pixel straight
beneath the slow
arc of gravity, not
ambivalent

like a scar traced
in a certain angle
of bedroom light. Bless
the wound

for what it has changed,
how it heals into itself.
Bless the needle 
that threads this new

opening of flesh,
quiet as it is
inevitable, extant
in the digital 

memories it evokes,
a snippet of life
lived within
the mobile app

I most associate
with human suffering
plus all my old 
friends back home.

Here, I upload 
a picture of a 43-year-old man
holding a phone and flexing
each muscle in his arm

at a weightroom mirror,
a screen that sends it 
right back to me:
simple, desperate.

I have measured out
a bit too much of my life
with plastic thimbles
of hydrogenated coffee cream.

The body, I caption,
was created to store endless
tranches
of strange information.

"Thirst Trap" by Caleb Curtiss. Originally published in The Rumpus. Used by permission of the poet.