Please note that today's episode contains mentions and descriptions of suicide.

If this topic is difficult for you, please feel free to skip.

We will be back tomorrow with more poems.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. Each year on July 13, my wife and I visit a Japanese garden in Vermont. A ritual pilgrimage made in memory of her previous husband who died by his own hands.

The gentle contours and green slopes create a meditative outdoor space where we celebrate life.

Like many, I found a similar strength and transcendence in the silence of Mark Rofgo's Chapel in Houston.

Today's poem unpacks the workings and limitations of sacred spaces and the unexpected

emotions they evoke. Bunkake from Sam's Club by Lottie Mitchell-Reiford

Rofko's New York was like Hopper's New York at first,

but no diners, only bars and the subway. City beneath the city

holds through the core of it all like some kind of rot, like some kind of calling throat. In the bars on the subway,

the blue of a fist quietly clenched in a pocket, the blue of breath held In, teeth digging into a bottom lip on a frozen street.

Rofco's New York, it lost focus,

it softened up at the edges.

Whiskey spins, bourbon fuzz.

They made it beautiful.

Took it apart.

Take me apart. A part.

Rofko was writing a book, you know.

Never finished.

For months after I got to America, I took pictures of every bunk cake I saw. They like to dress them up for

occasions, red, white and blue, sprinkles, sparklers, that sort of thing.

...