Hi, I'm poet and editor Leslie Signs.

I'll be taking on the host chair for the slowdown the next two weeks,

but don't worry.

Major will be back on July 1st.

I can't wait to share my selections with you.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. As a child on summer evenings, my friends and I ran through the neighborhood collecting lightning bugs.

They were most visible and vacant lots,

but we feared those dark places we sometimes entered.

So the hunt for them as 10 year olds also felt like an adventure. We gently coaxed them into glass mason jars,

then sat on the stewop, counting their lights to see who had the most.

Their underbelly's lit up and cast a glow onto our faces.

Later beneath a sheet in bed, I stared into the jar as the

fireflies crawled the glass and emitted their light.

Anyone weaned on notions of urban spaces

as nothing more than a hotbed of drugs and violence

can never see my neighborhood as a place of enchantment.

Yet those nights lightning bugs turned out streets into a miracle of twinklings.

Once in a poem, I describe the phenomenon as

Fireflies bequeathed earth stars,

such blink and blank and blink a bunk bunk.

Last year I learned that thousands of fireflies

during mating season set off their lights at the same time in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

...