1517: Liquefying by Chloe Yelena Miller
The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily
American Public Media
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
Today’s poem is Liquefying by Chloe Yelena Miller.
The Slowdown is your daily poetry ritual. In this episode, Maggie writes… “Poets use language the way an artist uses paint, the way sculptors use clay. It’s our material. We have to use it wisely, not only as craftspeople but as humans who care about others. The way today’s poem talks about vision — and vision problems — is original, and vulnerable, and full of nuance. It uses the idea of vision to speak not only into the future, but also, into the past.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder. |
| 0:04.1 | At least half of us will experience a mental illness in our lifetime. |
| 0:07.9 | In a new series of special reports from Call to Mind, we hear about the mental health impact of stress, climate change, immigration, and more. |
| 0:16.4 | Tune in for conversations with people managing hardship and experts seeking solutions. |
| 0:21.5 | Listen to call to mind from American public media. |
| 0:36.1 | I'm Maggie Smith, and this is the slowdown. |
| 0:39.2 | So many sayings, metaphors and and idioms, deal with vision. |
| 0:57.1 | The same way the heart is as much a symbol of feeling as it is an organ in the body, |
| 1:05.3 | vision is used to refer to thinking, as much as it is to seeing. |
| 1:12.8 | Figuratively, vision refers to mental perception |
| 1:16.8 | or the ability to anticipate what might happen in the future. |
| 1:23.5 | To look ahead, so to speak. |
| 1:27.3 | You can catch someone's eye, |
| 1:30.6 | keep your eye on someone, |
| 1:33.0 | and see eye to eye, or not. |
| 1:38.4 | The problem with using these metaphors |
| 1:41.9 | is they can easily slip into ablest language. |
| 1:47.7 | Linguistic microaggressions against people with disabilities. |
| 1:53.5 | These phrases become so baked into our thinking, we don't even realize that they're harmful. But that just means we need to be |
| 2:04.9 | more conscientious about the language we use. I try to avoid phrases like the blind leading the blind |
| 2:14.9 | and turning a blind eye for this reason. |
| 2:20.4 | The connotations are negative, and so is the message they send to people with disabilities. |
... |
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