I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown.

I don't know how I got here, and I don't know where I'm going, by which I mean in the big, existential way.

I know I was born from my parents.

I understand how biology works, more or less, and I know that when I die, I will be cremated or buried, depending on what

my will stipulates, if I ever get around to it on my list of things to do. But these answers are

more about the physical body and less about the soul. I don't understand the soul. Its arrivals and departures

are not marked on some sort of train schedule after all. I went to church with my parents as a child,

but I stopped going when I was a teenager. At the time, I felt like that

church wasn't aligned with my values. I needed to step away. In many ways, I'm still that girl,

and yet, as I grow older, I feel myself softening. I'm more open to different viewpoints, and part of that is maturation, but part of it is also exposure. I have friends and family from many different faith traditions, a wider variety than I had in my life as a child.

These days I have friends who are ministers, friends who are theologians, and friends who

are atheists. I learn from all of them. My friend, the poet Dana Levin, once said that my poems are God-curious, and I loved

that description. Part of what I do in my poems is pose existential questions to myself and think

and feel my way into them. That's not the same as

answering them. Luckily, poems don't require us to have answers. Today's poem is a poem that

inspires me to ask better questions about the world and about the soul and about the idea of God.

Soot by Kava Akbar

Sometimes God comes to earth disguised as rust, chewing away a chain-link fence or a mariner's knife.

From up so close we must seem clumsy and gloomless, like new lovers undressing in front of each other for the first time.

Regarding loss, I'm afraid to keep it in the story, worried what I might bring back to life.

Like the marble angel who woke to find his innards scattered around

his feet. Blood from the belly tastes sweeter than blood from anywhere else. We know this, but don't know

...