I'm Italy Moan and this is the slowdown.

I have always been fascinated by bones, the way they fit together, the way they break

and mend and also how they are us and not us at all.

There is a beauty to them even in their decomposition.

I once carried the bones of a seal skull home from the beach carefully in my backpack when

I lived in Cape Cod.

I situated it on my front steps and it felt almost alive to me.

That seal was living in his stage of his existence and I was living in mine.

I'd walk up the steps and say hello to my seal skull and it seemed the two of us worked

in tandem to both praise death and defy it.

I still remember the first time I saw Georgia O'Keefe's paintings of skulls against the

desert landscape, the bleached angular bones.

Those dramatic subjects seem to be so much more than what they were.

In poetry, we often talk about how looking closely is a way of loving.

I know that I can't help but lean into the small objects I see and with my attention,

with my words, illuminate them.

In O'Keefe's painting from the far away nearby, we see the enormous rack of a stag, fleshless

and cleaned by death and the desert.

But with the artist's attention, the bones become more than bones.

They become the animal itself.

They become death itself.

I love the way the painting can transform a found object into something beyond its exact

...