TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

Poets love to play with language. It’s our business! There are so many different kinds of word play, 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 racecar. 

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 four same 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 Silano, who died in May of 2025.

When I learn Catastrophically
by Martha Silano

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
& song, between widgeons & windows, weather
& 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
& 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 & less of who I’d been, increasingly
less concerned about the dishes in 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 
mole hills, actual mole hills, piles of salty roe,
mountains of limes. Catastrophically, it’s rare:
one in 500,000, but then I learned the odds 
of being born: one 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 sis & bro whom I’ll leave like a sinking island,
Ferdinandea, 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 & father, bits of me 
on San Juan Island, at Mason Lake & Seward Park,
where I’d wandered like a morose remorse,
a lore-less reel, a miser silo, a doddering crow.

"When I learn  Catastrophically" by Martha Silano. Used by permission of the poet's estate.