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

Think back to your first crush.

Not your first girlfriend or boyfriend or the first classmate you asked to a dance or to the movies,

but the first person you ever felt that way about.

Chances are, it might not have been a classmate or a neighbor,

but an actor or a musician, a celebrity.

I've had so many conversations with friends

about the posters in our bedrooms and in our lockers when we were

young. I'll be dating myself by saying this, but I had a subscription to Teen Beat magazine in the 80s.

I definitely had posters of Kirk Cameron on my bedroom walls, along with a lot of

Beatles posters. John Lennon was my favorite back then. John was way too old for me, and Kirk and I are

completely incompatible ideologically.

I know this now.

But all of that was irrelevant when I was 12.

Crushes, after all, aren't logical.

In today's poem, the speaker feels something awaken in him while watching

the film Remember the Titans. The poem weaves together the pain and the beauty of desire,

which can become so nodded in our teen years, it leaves the reader

a little breathless, like only a crush can.

This is a poem by Kieran Walquist.

Isobutal nitrate but the house parties thunderous an indoor pool so i hear i used to be all right right

his lips to my ear yellow bottle and red bolt, held out like a wildflower.

...