I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. now.

With enough concentration, I can vividly recall my youth while writing.

But lately, that mental time travel occurs even when I'm not at my desk,

while performing the most mundane of duties, images overlay onto the present,

like a form of augmented reality. Walking in an apple orchard triggers a memory of climbing a great aunt's peach tree.

Petricore evokes that time I watched the sun shower rain only on one side of a street. The other side was lit like a poolside party.

In each instance, my body holds Sadade, a longing and melancholy, even a wrenching sadness.

I hear my younger self echo inside of my adult self.

These memories make me think I have been duped, that the true luxury of living is back

there in time, in days when I played long into the night, in those summers when I ran without

a care between the shadows made by yellow streetlights.

Back then I was full of adventure. My innocence was like a

ticket to a future one I wished not to go to. Poems contain time, time which we feel palpably in its cadences and imagery.

Today's poem takes us on a sentimental journey through recollections of a childhood,

one that beckons us to our own paths in search of our freedoms.

The Memory of the Young by Maria Hummel

The Memory of the Young is Grasshopper. Thin legs, backwards knees balance a being that is green. Gold

Tinge. That wants to keep singing that sings the afternoon rays serrated

that flex the sight of wind. The memory of the young is leap by leap. It sweeps itself for clues to its song.

One day, it says, and it means 23. Long ago, it says, and it means a week.

Two round eyes look out from it.

...