Are you attending the AWP 2025 conference in LA?

Join the slowdown for a live off-site event with me, Major, Padrake Otuma, and more friends

for poetry, conversation, and some fun and games. Friday, March 28th at 7 p.m. at the Crawford

in Pasadena. Tickets at LAS.com slash events.

I'm Major Jackson. And this is the slowdown.

A good snowstorm

a good snowstorm mutes the noise of people,

cars, and even airplanes. A good snowstorm mutes the noise of people, cars, and even airplanes.

A good snowstorm makes room for birdsong and the noises of forest creatures in Vermont.

Here in Nashville, lack of road salt and snow plows all but shuts the city down.

The only sound is big flakes falling, an accumulation of silence.

I love how nature disrupts the important going-ons of humans.

How it forces us to grind to a halt and makes us one with our environs.

We are smart to heed its signs.

Today's poem builds from biblical and folk beliefs that weather is another way of receiving

divine messages, in understanding closer to the mysteries and laws of nature.

This is a poem by Marissa Davis. If we had known, someone would have said to buy kerosene. Someone would have said, fell the trees. If only the

ancients or the birds, they have gone oddly still, hardly breathing in those branches

clean as the bones on a glutton's plate, or asked, what on earth do the bats want, crying like that?

And why is every small life fleeing?

Mother, knowing such long stillness is a kind of vertigo, would have made us all pray

our traveller's mercies.

...