I'm Italy Mo, and this is the slowdown.

The other day, someone I know posted a quote from the poet Mary Oliver.

Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?

And I almost began to cry.

I kept thinking of how scared I've been, how scared many of us have been during these

years of the pandemic.

And of course, it's not just the pandemic, it's so many overwhelming existential fears.

I read that quote and I suddenly longed for breath, for relief, for the end of fear.

In today's poem, we see the speaker investigate fear and consequences in a world where danger

comes in many different forms.

Get out of the water by Monica Barrico.

My uncle keeps his birth certificate in his trunk.

So when he gets pulled over, he can prove he was born in the United States.

He calls my father to say they want us dead, who, all of them.

My uncle won't wear a mask.

It happened on what day of what month he stretched his hand in the dark of the movie theater

and dipped into my father's popcorn.

He ate it all without asking.

My father wants a picture of what I look like, bandana around my face, before I go to the

grocery.

He says, when your uncle went back to the store, the white woman next to him said she didn't

have to wear a mask and they let her in just like that.

...