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

As a writer, I'm always jotting things down, taking notes, making lists.

More and more I use the Notes app on my phone, but for years I scribbled on whatever scraps of paper I could find.

Carbon copies from my checkbook, receipts pulled from my wallet, even napkins

in a pinch. The method has changed, but my impulse is the same, to hold onto something before it

slips away. Today's poem is a favorite of mine for its associative leaps,

the way it carries us from image to image, memory to memory.

I admire the way it uses the language we encounter in our lives to make those leaps,

road signs, the names of streets and flowers,

the lists we find in our pockets.

Animal Prudence by Kathy Fagan Mice drink the rainwater before dying by the poison we set in the cupboard for them.

They come for the bird seed, and winter is so gray here, the sight of a single cardinal

can keep us warm for days. We'll justify anything, and by we I mean I, and by I, I mean we, with our man is the only

animal who, and our manifest destiny, killers each of us by greater or lesser degrees. Instead of a gun or knife in my pocket,

there are two notes,

on which the dandelion reads one.

I don't know what it means,

but cannot throw it away.

It is soft as cashmere.

The other says coffee, chocolate, birdseed.

I should be extinct by now, except I can't make it onto that list either. Like toothpicks made of plain wood, some things are increasingly hard to find.

Even when he was a young drunk going deaf from target practice,

...