Loading summary
A
This podcast is supported by Raymond James, a financial firm offering wealth management, banking and capital markets services that are inspired by people before Raymond James. Financial Advisors build plans. They build relationships so they can craft individual strategies designed to achieve priorities and pursue what's possible. That's the power of personal disclosures@raymondjames.com Raymond James Associates, Inc. Member NYSE SIPIC@AMICA Insurance, we know it's
B
not just about where you're going, but who you go with. That's why we work even harder to protect what matters most. And as a mutual insurance company, we're built for our customers and prioritize your needs. Amica Empathy is our best policy. Visit amica.com and get a quote today
C
Foreign. I'm Maggie Smith and this is the Slowdown. Think back to your first crush. Not your first girlfriend or boyfriend or the first classmate you asked to a dance or to the movies, but the first person you ever felt that way about. Chances are it might not have been a classmate or a neighbor, but an actor or a musician. A celebrity. I've had so many conversations with friends about the posters in our bedrooms and in our lockers when we were young. I'll be dating myself by saying this, but I had a subscription to Teen Beat magazine in the 80s. I definitely had posters of Kirk Cameron on my bedroom walls, along with a lot of Beatles posters. John Lennon was my favorite back then. John was way too old for me, and Kirk and I are completely incompatible ideologically. I know this now, but all of that was irrelevant when I was 12. Crushes, after all, aren't logical. In today's poem, the speaker feels something awaken in him while watching the film Remember the Titans. The poem weaves together the pain and the beauty of desire, which can become so knotted in our teen years. It leaves the reader a little breathless, like only a crush can. This is a poem by Kieran Walquist. Isobutyl nitrite but the house party's thunderous. An indoor pool, so I hear. I used to be all right, right? His lips to my ear, yellow bottle and red bolt held out like like a wildflower. I sniff a little, like nail polish, a little like chlorine. It scratches back. It's my first time. My first time at the YMCA pool. I almost drowned. Ladies rested back on towels, dried turquoise toes. I was pulled out of the water like a sunken bicycle by an older boy who looked like sunshine from Remember the Titans. After I cried alone in the locker room at the party, we huff and become light headed, cleaned by VCR cleaner. I kiss him, then kiss him harder. He grabs my blond hair. We are two boys, mouth to mouth, trying to rescue each other. I couldn't rescue Remember the Titans from our VCR becoming Cannibal, the VHS eaten alive and the real all that black ribbon gutted out. What was left glittered like party streamers. It rippled like light upon a pool. I saw everything, though Sunshine and Birdier. When Sunshine, the new kid, comes to football practice with long blond hair, when Bertier says, hey fellas, look at that fruitcake. When in a locker room, Sunshine tells Bertiere, you know what I want and lunges to kiss him. The fight between them. For a month I'd lie in bed and face the cool wall, repeat to myself, you know what I want, you know? Only later did I realize the kiss, the fight, the smile on Sunshine's face as a tease, the joke it was meant to be. When I was pulled out of the water, I heard another how do you drown a blonde? You put a scratch and sniff sticker at the bottom of a pool. 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 slowdownshow and blueskylowdownshow.org.
D
Foreign. Hey, it's Francis Lamb, host of the Splendid Table Podcast. Every week on our show, we celebrate the intersection of food and life, and this month we're releasing a new series called Culinary Masters. It highlights some of the most iconic people in the food world, and we're revisiting conversations with people who have fundamentally changed how many of us cook and think about food. People like Jacques Pepin, Claudia Rodin and Tony Bourdain, to name a few. You can listen to this special series now. Just search for the Splendid Table in your podcast. Apparently.
Episode 1528: "Isobutyl Nitrite" by Kieron Walquist
Host: Maggie Smith
Date: June 2, 2026
This episode of The Slowdown, hosted by poet Maggie Smith, explores the intense, confusing, and often illogical emotions of a first crush through the lens of Kieron Walquist’s poem “Isobutyl Nitrite.” Smith sets the stage with a reflective introduction about her own early celebrity crushes, before presenting and contemplating Walquist’s vivid poem, which intertwines themes of desire, memory, coming-of-age, and identity. The episode offers listeners a raw meditation on the potent mixture of shame, euphoria, and discovery that so often marks adolescent longing.
This episode of The Slowdown offers a poignant meditation on queer adolescence and the mysterious, formative power of desire. Through Smith’s personal reflections and Walquist’s evocative poem, listeners are invited to confront their own memories of longing and the ways pop culture can both clarify and complicate our earliest understandings of self and other. The language is intimate, funny, and vulnerable—creating a sense of shared experience for anyone who has ever felt out of place or moved by a fleeting, formative crush.