Today’s episode is guest hosted by Myka Kielbon.

Transcript

I’m Myka Kielbon and this is The Slowdown.

I’m writing this just after getting off the phone with my best friend of twenty-three years. I’m in one of those moments where I need my oldest friend to sit on the couch next to me while I feel. So we bought her a plane ticket for this weekend — she bought the one to come here and I got the one to send her home. It felt a little ridiculous. I worried my request was a bit over-reactive. But we both agreed: This is why we work. To do stuff like this.

Today’s poem excavates the hard route to self-love, but it also shows us the trick: that self-love doesn’t happen all alone.

Forgiveness Rock Record
by Tawanda Mulalu

& where should I find myself if not in my mother's eyes or my father's 
        hands or my sister's care 
for the world. & if I should die I should die because that is the way
        the world was designed. & what was 
the thing that drew me up from myself as if a river flowed upwards 
        towards the pull of the moon. & 

would you not want to be a tide-song, called for constantly by the
        mere fact of rock: large, white, above: 
asking you to be real by virtue of movement, of its heaviness regarding 
        movement & to be seen as a slow 
tragedy of the sun's shadow. 

I am asking for this life to call for me. I am asking myself to call for 
                                                                                the acceptance of this skin, its pre-
dispositions, navigated keenly by eyes which aren't my own. by histo- 
        ries pieced and un-pieced together
by various arguments of human, sometimes even of love—like watch- 
        ing those that were born before me 

decide they were this thing called human & summoned themselves. 
        What is there beneath the rock is it 
as heavy as the rock itself. American cartoons said that the moon was 
        made of stinky cheese. I thought 

marshmallows. Or of another sweet I cannot recall that bursts into 
        powders of soft sugar upon biting it. Or 
maybe it is the cautious marble of a jawbreaker (so large that my sister 
        and I stored them in the fridge & 

licked them over the curve of days leading up to some other sort of 
        awareness. Somewhere along the line 
she is wronged: touched. It might have been then. I couldn't see.   
        Didn't see. She's older. I was greedy & 
eventually its big sphere would soften to a pearl, its wrapping finally 
        larger than the thing it held). Maybe 

dear moon, what I am asking of you is to become this sun, or vice 
        versa, or why can't I sleep for as long 

as I used to. It is not that I don't want to be alive (he says    
        convincingly) but that there is a calmness of 

constant possibility that sleeping affords, that to be woken so early, so 
        constantly now by my body as if 

he is begging me, really begging me, to change my life to not reach the 
        age of I have wasted my life to say 
to itself that I have a life to say to others I want to be in this world to 
        really be able to hear the words

I love you & I want to be with you & you're a good person & people like 
        you & you're beautiful & 

not want to instantly retreat to some question of how unlike the moon   
        is to the sun, but how they hold 

one another, even if one is nearly always disappearing. Yes, that's what 
        I wanted to hear: myself 
as if I were another person in another's mouth. As if that were what it   
        is to live. Okay. So maybe it was. 

“Forgiveness Rock Record” from PLEASE MAKE ME PRETTY, I DON’T WANT TO DIE: Poems by Tawanda Mulalu © 2022 Princeton University Press. Used by permission of the publisher.