TRANSCRIPT

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

One of the sounds I like best is fire. I don’t mean the loud roar of a forest fire, I mean the soothing crackling and popping noises of a fireplace. The fireplace in my living room is out of commission, but it’s not unusual for me to put the fireplace channel on while I’m working. “Crackling Birchwood Fireplace in HD,” specifically. My kids make fun of me for being particular, but what can I say? I like the look of the birch logs. And sometimes I find one of them reading on the couch, cuddled up with our dog, having a cup of tea … and what’s on TV? That’s right. Crackling Birchwood Fireplace.

Fireplaces, thunderstorms, ocean waves—these sounds are popular “white noise” for sleep and relaxation. And it’s odd, when I think about how these sounds represent very real dangers in nature. About how we are soothed by the contained version of something that can harm us.

Today’s poem masterfully balances that tension, and it makes me think about these sounds in a new way.

Or am I a room with a roof taken off, still holding onto my idea of a ceiling
by Kelly Hoffer

the other night I woke in the early morning

and texted myself, “can you hear a fire”

not asking about the moment

then but about the potential 

of a moment of being proximate

to heat and feeling it with my ears.

my sleeping self, thinking not, I think, of

the domesticated crackle of our

gatherings out in the cold of what 

will be remembered as the time

of collective sickness and the collective fear

of sickness approaching. the hearth kept us civil

for half an hour. my sleeping self, tentative, opening,

asks her virtual self, does a wall of fire

sound on the scale

of a waterfall? the roaring of what could be 

mistaken to be a highway

filled with metal

containers moved by their combusting

innards. I realize then, we mistake water

for fire all the time, every morning after a

heavy rain when the world is especially 

recalcitrant. in the case of the non-

virtual fire, temperature or smell

or of course, the glow, is what, I assume, 

we render first, 

but I am stuck on the sound of something

big enough to kill me.

we shave the grasses down 

to a bristled penumbra, we build bonfires

from the slash to convince 

ourselves of our reckoning,

newly unsettled, that this is the planet

we’ve mastered, we hold our invisible 

ceilings without shelter

standing aside the effigies of our problems

papier-mâchéd, caricatured, features too large

as if we made the feelings big enough

they would take up

and leave, not taking up 

so much space inside us. 

the fire department is on call, waiting

for things to get out 

of control, still, 

the morning after the fire

doesn’t burn me up 

my snot is laced with black ribbons.

next to the flames, I did not register the smoke—

what dollhouse tragedy were we

playing at.

"Or am I a room with a roof taken off, still holding onto my idea of ceiling" from FIRE SERIES by Kelly Hoffer © 2026 Kelly Hoffer. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.