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State Farm Announcer (1:01)

Let's say your small business has a problem. Like maybe one of your doggie daycare customers had an accident. You might say something like doggone it.

Maggie Smith (1:12)

Hi Chihuahua. Holy schnauzers.

State Farm Announcer (1:14)

But if you need someone who can actually help, just say, like a good.

Maggie Smith (1:18)

Neighbor, State Farm is there.

State Farm Announcer (1:20)

And get help filing a claim from your local state farm agent for your small business insurance needs. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

Maggie Smith (1:36)

I'm Maggie Smith and this is the Slow Down. Poets love to play with language. It's our business. There are so many different kinds of wordplay, and some of the techniques involve the letters of words. A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards. The name Hannah H A N N a H is a palindrome. It reads the same in reverse. Other examples include the words civic, kayak and race car. If you play Scrabble or other word games, it's useful to be able to make anagrams quickly. When you make an anagram, you rearrange the letters of one word to make a new one. For example, vile is an anagram of evil. Both words use the same four letters. Today's poem unexpectedly merges the playfulness of anagrams with the gravitas of a terminal diagnosis, the weight of reckoning with the end of one's life. But when you think about it, an anagram isn't just play. It's a way of making a thing out of something else. Entirely, a way of seeing and creating other possibilities, a way of containing multitudes. This is a poem by the late Martha Solano, who died in May of 2025. When I learn Catastrophically is an anagram of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. When I learn I probably have a couple years, maybe catastrophically less Crossword puzzles begin to feel meaningless, though not the pair of mergansers, not the red cardinal of my heart. The sky does all sorts of marvelously uncatastrophic things that winter I shimmy between science and song, between widgeons and windows, weather and its invitation to walk, walking which becomes my lose less my less morsels, my lose smile while more sore looms. Sometimes I wander for hours, my mile pace over half an hour, everyone passing the lady at dusk talking to herself about looming rooms, Soil lies ire and else chuckling about my mileage gone down the toilet I plant the rose of before, the oil of after. As each breath elevates to miracle, I become both more and less of who I'd been, increasingly less concerned about the dishes and the sink, more worried about the words in my notebooks, all those unfinished poems. I remember the fear of getting lost if I left the main trail. I remember molehills, actual molehills, piles of salty roe, mountains of limes. Catastrophically, it's rare, 1 in 500,000. But then I learned the odds of being born 1 in 42 billion, though not sure how they calculate, or the chances of the cosmos having just the right amount of force to not break apart. Less smiles, more lose miser miles, a CIS and bro whom I'll leave like a sinking island, Ferdinandia, that submerged volcano in Sicily, though let's be real, I was more pen mole than lava, more a looming annoyance than a bridge to some continent. I'd wanted to be composted, but it cost 9k to convert me to dirt, so I opted for whatever was easiest to carry across state lines, some of me beside my mother and father, bits of me on San Juan island at Mason Lake and Seward park, where I'd wandered like a morose remorse, a lureless reel, a miser silo, a doddering crow. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. To get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter and find us on Instagram, lodownshow and blueskylowdownshow.org hi, it's Maggie. The slowdown helps you discover new poems and revisit old favorites. You can help us continue showcasing poetry from a diverse swath of authors and by making a tax deductible gift. Head to slowdownshow.org donate today.