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

Poets love to play with language. It's our business.

There are so many different kinds of wordplay, and some of the techniques involve the letters of words.

A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards. The name Hannah, H-A-N-N-A-H, is a palindrome. It reads the same in reverse. Other examples include the words civic, kayak, and race car. If you play Scrabble or other word games, it's useful to be

able to make anagrams quickly. When you make anagram, you rearrange the letters of one word

to make a new one. For example, vial is an anagram of evil.

Both words use the same four letters.

Today's poem unexpectedly merges the playfulness of anagrams

with the gravitas of a terminal diagnosis, the weight of reckoning with

the end of one's life. But when you think about it, an anagram isn't just play. It's a way of making

a thing out of something else entirely, a way of seeing and creating other possibilities, a way of

containing multitudes.

This is a poem by the late Martha Solano, who died in May of 2025.

When I learn

catastrophically is an anagram

of amiotrophic lateral sclerosis.

When I learn I probably have a couple years,

maybe catastrophically, less.

Crossword puzzles begin to feel meaningless, though not the pair of Murgansers, not the red

cardinal of my heart. The sky does all sorts of marvelously un-catastrophic things, that winter I shimmy

between science and song, between widgeons and windows, weather, and its invitation to walk.

Walking, which becomes my lose less,

...