Hi, it's Maggie Smith. I'm the new host of The Slowdown, and I'm so looking forward to sharing new episodes with you starting August 18th.

In the meantime, we're revisiting some favorites from the archive, like today's episode from Ada Limon.

I'm grateful to share her work with you today.

Music I'm grateful to share her work with you today. I'm Adela Limo and this is the slowdown.

I spend a lot of time thinking about hunger.

Too much time, really.

I'm from a family who starts planning their next meal while they are sitting down to their first meal.

I have read books on hunger, how to feel full, how to know when you are hungry, or just bored, or maybe sad. But hunger is also something else, isn't it? It's not

just the physical need to eat, but sometimes it is the want to be made satisfied, to feel

for once like we have enough. I love watching children push away a plate when they've discovered

fullness. It is a gift to be full and to know it. But me, I'm greedy with food.

I love it.

I over order from restaurants and cook too much food at home.

I want to feel not just full but fixed in some way, as if each meal will be my last and

I must take it in like like the world, all at once.

Today's poem centers on these ideas of hunger and fullness.

It asks, what can satisfy us in a world that is often telling us we are not enough and will never have enough.

I worry my mother will die and I will know nothing by Asa Drake.

Sometimes history is too beautiful to be believed. Until dinner time, my grandmother sold gardenias wrapped in banana leaves.

Then she found better ways to earn a living.

Years later, at an American restaurant,

I'm mistaken for a waitress wearing all my silk.

...