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

This show is a place where we come together, to take a pause,

to find space amidst the daily noise,

against or alongside the difficult and dismaying news of the day.

Today I'm pausing to remember something horrible that happened nearly a decade ago.

On June 12, 2016, a man walked into Pulse, an LGBT LGBTQIA-plus friendly nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and opened fire.

He killed 49 people. Forty-nine people.

Pulse was hosting its regular Latin night, the night of the shooting, and most of the victims

were Latino, Latino and queer and young, most of them in their 20s and 30s.

It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since 9-11.

It was also the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history at the time, though only for a year or so, until the 2017

shooting at a Las Vegas music festival. I remember these events well because they horrified me

and broke my heart. I remember because I was enraged,

am still enraged, at our inability to enact common-sense gun control in this country. I remember because I'd written a poem called Good Bones

that went viral for the first time in the wake of the pulse shooting

and again after the Las Vegas massacre.

I call that poem a disaster barometer

because any surge in its popularity

is a sign that something terrible has happened.

We read and share poems in times of tragedy

because they say something we need to say or need to hear.

That is certainly true of today's poem.

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