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

So many police names make me smile.

In Ohio, I often find myself driving down, go-down road.

You can go-down, go-down road.

And there's another road I know of called seldom seen.

It feels a little literal, but who am I to judge?

There is power in naming, as today's poem reminds us. Once you've seen the violence

tucked inside the place name Lynchburg, barely hidden at all, hidden in plain sight.

I don't think you'll be able to see or say the word the same way again.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it, nor should you.

The poem climbs the scaffold and tells you what it sees by Natasha Aladikin.

Charlottesville, Virginia.

Driving alone down Old Lynchburg Road in the lilac haze of dusk, it is so beautiful

that for a moment you forget that the root word in this road you drive down every day is Lynch,

that the origin of Lynch, as you know it, comes from the name of men also named Lynch, though no one seems to know which one of them should be credited

for this. And you think to yourself, somewhere in here is probably

a metaphor about the power of naming, of how easy it is to forget the origins of things when you hold such

power.

But driving down Old Lynchburg Road, this is not just another history lesson or a play with words.

It is these two gallons of gas left in this car that isn't yours. And the fresh growl in your

stomach reminding you that your days in this place are as numbered as light-polluted stars

and poems. Poems you could take or leave.

...