Today’s poem is Poem to Watch over You by Omotara James.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Diannely Antigua writes… “On Juneteenth, freedom feels like a welcome long denied. It is also a welcome we must keep making possible for each other every day. Not only in law, but in practice. Freedom should be both a declaration and a way of living. Today’s poem imagines that kind of welcome. It speaks to that miracle of arrival, to a life entering the world without needing justification. It reminds us that before the world teaches us otherwise, there is the simple and sacred fact of being received.”

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Today’s poem is Boombox Ode: Enjoy the Silence by K. Iver.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Diannely Antigua writes… “There was a time when love, or the possibility of it, came to you as a mixtape or burned CD. The songs were carefully chosen and painstakingly ordered. It wasn’t limitless, like today’s playlists. You had maybe seventy or eighty minutes, which meant every song had to mean something. And when you got one, you’d sit there rewinding and replaying, trying to decode the hidden message the music played back.”

This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation and get access to the sponsor-free version of The Slowdown today. Slowdownshow.org/donate

Today’s poem is Pluto by Maggie Dietz.

The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, guest host Diannely Antigua writes… “When I was younger, I learned the order of the planets through a sentence I’ll never forget: “My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas.” This mnemonic device was playful and ridiculous, but I can see now how it was a way of holding something vast inside something small. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Back then, Pluto was still a planet. But that changed in 2006 when scientists said Pluto didn’t meet the definition of a planet anymore. Its gravitational pull wasn’t dominant enough, so it was reclassified and renamed a dwarf planet. Pluto didn’t disappear, though. Out there in the astronomical unknown, it kept its shape. It kept orbiting the sun. Even its five moons remained, just as always. The only thing that changed was what we decided to call it.”

This show is supported by gifts from listeners. Support The Slowdown with a donation and get access to the sponsor-free version of The Slowdown today. Slowdownshow.org/donate