I'm Adalimone and this is the slowdown.

I bet most people think that poets believe that language is everything.

That language is the way we unravel the world.

In some ways that might be true, but many poets are also highly committed to the failure

of language.

Sometimes that failure is what brought us to the page in the first place.

Even as a child, I loved the way mispronunciations or mistranslations would create whole new definitions.

My grandmother called the Osterizer Blender the Osterizer, and so I imagined a Blender who

ostracized every other kitchen appliance.

She'd also say that someone exasperated their cereal instead of aspirated.

So I'd imagine someone just talking way too long and too much to their cornflakes until

they just gave up and walked away.

I felt like there was magic in those little slips of language in the way we get things

wrong, in the way our imagination fills in the space.

I've always loved that.

I've always thought some poets were born because we hear those mistakes.

I once mistook put the cart before the horse as put the heart before the horse, and it

still makes more sense to me.

In today's poem, the speaker allows us to see how the places where language falls apart

are the places that sometimes shape our whole reality.

The poem also shifts into how a crush can make language disappear entirely.

An algorithm matches me with a nice girl and I tell her by Jaira Deng.

...