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I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown. In 1994, I was 17, my daughter's age.

I remember that as a time when I was trying to figure out who I was.

But to some degree, we're always trying to figure that out, aren't we?

Today's poem is set in 1994, a formative year for the speaker, too.

My 1994 by Stephanie Burt

I didn't know, but I knew. I took off the dress Kay offered and apologized for my striped boxers. I called myself a kid in a candy store when I was a teen in a lingerie store.

I wanted to move to a place I knew secondhand, from TV to Topshop, boots, post codes, in England land.

I had mixed up the opposite of nostalgia,

a longing to be someplace I could never call home

with my wish to become someone new.

There's a wasp between my window pane

and its wire mesh screen.

She wants to get out.

She hovers and dives toward some way,

not knowing there can be no way unless someone unlocks the glass and lifts the window itself

and lets the wasp into the room.

...