TRANSCRIPT

 I'm Myka Kielbon, and this is The Slowdown.

Sharing poetry is a two-way street. So today, you'll be hearing a poem selected by one of our listeners. Enjoy.

I'm J.D. Isip, and I'm in Richmond, Texas. One of the more embarrassing things about me is I'm a basic bitch. Can I say basic bitch? I go to Walmart for my clothes, my groceries, for the dog food, everything. I've been to nice grocery stores but they tend to overwhelm me. I don't need 12,000 kinds of olives. I don't need all of that. And so I just go to Walmart 'cause I know exactly where everything is, and I'm so boring. But I've learned to accept and love my boring-ness and Walmart to an extent.

When you go to a grocery store, everything is "on display" and you're also on display, too, right? And I don't know about you, but I think about what I wear wherever I walk into. I also look around and think, "Did these people think about what they wore?" And it's so judgmental, right? It's so, "Oh, I'm judging these people." But I can also be introspective and I can also feel nervous about how people see me, and all of those things can be happening at the same time. Walking through grocery stores, you don't know what's around the corner. It could be an old teacher or an old friend or something like that. And so again, you're always kind of nervous. Or, it could be somebody super attractive that you're just like, "Oh my gosh, don't look like an idiot in front of this person.

But there's also those nice, sweet moments where somebody asks you to reach up for, a cereal box or something like that. And damned if I don't feel like a hero when I'm like, "Yes, here you go. Here's the cereal box that was too high for you." And I feel so manly, right? I'm all about being like small hero, just little small hero moments.

Kind of a little bit of background, I was dishonorably discharged from the military for being gay when I was 23. And on my paperwork it said not because I had done anything, but because I had "a propensity for homosexual activity." In this poem, the word propensity is also there as a who are we? What can we be? And do we have the propensity to be beautiful? Do we have the propensity to love ourselves? And it, to me, it was such a specific word choice in the poem, but it also called out to me about these personalities that are all in this poem. The people who want to be beautiful, the people who want to be young, and the people who wanna be skinny and all those kinds of things. We also have the ability or the propensity to just love ourselves as what we are.

Today's poem is a cheeky tableau of a grocery store where we get to see what we present to the world, but also what the world presents to us.

 Florida Doll Sonnet
by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton

I love Fresh Market but always feel underdressed
squeezing overpriced limes. Louis Vuitton,
Gucci, Fiorucci, and all the ancient East Coast girls
with their scarecrow limbs and Joker grins.
Their silver fox husbands, rosy from tanning beds,
steady their ladies who shuffle along in Miu Miu’s
(not muumuus) and make me hide behind towers
of handmade soaps and white pistachios. Who 
knew I’d still feel like the high school fat girl
some thirty-odd years later? My Birkenstocks
and my propensity for fig newtons? Still, whenever
I’m face to face with a face that is no more real
than a doll’s, I try to love my crinkles, my saggy
chin skin. My body organic, with no preservatives.

“Florida Doll Sonnet” by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton. Used by permission of Denise Duhamel.

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