I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. down. I have traveled many miles across the country in a car.

I have taken in my fair share of asphalt roads and billboard signs.

I have talked to numerous gas station attendance and driven past many big box stores.

Costco, Home Depot, books a million.

I revel in the show of Americana, but the sameness of the experience makes me believe

I haven't journeyed far from home. There's something sad sometimes about taking in all of the country from the fringes.

I used to view the highway as a symbol of escape and possibility.

Now I view the road as a complex portal to our great melancholy.

Today's poem exposes a thin veil of desolation on the surface of life. It's as if we are all

waiting for something magical to happen, to lift us out of our collective

spiritual anguish.

Shelf life by Nathan Javier Osorio.

I count the stones I throw from the overpass.

It's amber light buzzing in the fog that crawls through the community college quad,

and over the quiet music emporium, its dusty stratocasters and Susophones pointed proudly

toward the sun that will extinguish thousands of years from now in a grand act of coming up short.

Espires of flame pirouetting into themselves, feeling whole for the first time.

A blues thick like the powdered malt, my tia poles from the shelves of the warehouse club.

Its display of oversized membership cards twirling on clear noodles of nearly invisible twine above the cash registers.

Where Poppy with his head draped in a paper hairnet, hands out hot dog and soft drink

specials, his disposition industrial, like the tenacity of spam or the American spirit, his shelf life

...