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Happy Poetry Month Friends of the Slowdown are invited to celebrate with a special offer from Poetry magazine this April. An annual subscription to Poetry includes a limited edition notebook. The notebook features a devious quote from Dorothy Elaski on its cover. I'm almost always lying in a poem, and the full poem is inside. Use the notebook for your own poems, lies and secrets. Subscribe today@poetrymagazine.org lying National Poetry Month is the perfect time to champion the daily pause you count on from the Slowdown. Your donation keeps these free moments of reflection available to anyone who needs them. No paywall, just poetry and perspective in a short, steady ritual. Celebrate poetry this month by helping more people access it every weekday. Donate and show your support@slowdownshow.org. I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the Slowdown. I'm a novice when it comes to birding. An amateur, I have the Merlin app on my phone, so when I'm out and I hear a bird's call or song, I can hit record and let the app identify the bird for me by sound. It knows my location, so it searches a database of birds known to be in my area. It's nerdy, I know, but I love it. A few years ago, I went birding with a friend of mine who's an expert. We drove out to one of her favorite spots, a historic cemetery in central Ohio. She lent me an incredibly high tech set of binoculars and we wandered around the grounds. I laughed later, looking at the photos on my phone, because most of the shots I took were of headstones and family crips. I took very few photos of birds or even the sky instead, focusing on the ground and what lay beneath it. Walking among the graves in Green Lawn Cemetery, I felt like I was supposed to walk solemnly and whisper. I remember being wary about where and potentially over whom I was stepping. Cemeteries are peaceful, reverent places, and yet they're places I don't visit regularly. Not unless I'm birding, apparently. If I want to feel close to someone I've lost, I'm more likely to look at photos or tell stories or listen to songs that remind me of them. And yes, I'm likely to write about them. That's part of how I honor their memory and keep them close. Today's poem may be set in a cemetery, but it remembers a loved one alive and embodied anniversary by Edward Saleem. Kneeling to carve back the grass, encroaching like cuticles on a fingernail, I noticed how close her flat headstone was to the others around hers watering the flowers at his wife's grave, an old man told me, they're placed above the abdomens, not the heads, as you'd expect. I think he meant to explain they were less crowded underground than it appeared, but I didn't follow. I pictured a pair of rotten feet standing on my mother's head, her green feet standing on another's head, and so on in a horizontal grid, gaudy totem poles. I wasn't sure what part of her body I stood over, but I stepped aside, as if she could feel my weight, like when I was a child and she'd lie on the carpet and tell me to walk all over her back. I'd laugh at the funny feeling underfoot, the squishy, bony, fleshy ground I massaged by walking, losing my wobbly balance, turning around after each short lap from shoulders to butt. Yet standing off to the side of her grave felt wrong. Every year, every visit, like the bashing of a Go. 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. Find us on Instagram @downdownshow and bluesky.downdownshow.org. Hi, it's Maggie. Thanks for listening to the Slowdown. Whether you press play to find calm or vivid inspiration, we're glad you're here. As a public media podcast, we rely on listener support to share these moments of poetry. Please consider donating today@slowdownshow.org donate.