To the woman crying uncontrollably in the next stall
This Viral Story About A Women Crying In A Bathroom Stall Will Make You Weep
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Transcript I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown. One of my favorite things about words is their history. As a writer, I’m curious about the words I choose for my poems. When I look up the origin of a word, it’s like unfolding a map, and seeing the journey that word has taken to reach me. Suddenly I know it better. It feels special to me, like a friend. Let’s take the word migrant, for example—a word I’ve used in a poem. Migrant comes from the Latin migrans, meaning "changing place." So a migrant is one who moves from place to place. The adjective migratory is related to migrant. As in migratory birds. The verb migrate is related, too. On any given day, reading or watching or listening to the news, I’m confronted with divisive arguments about where people belong. All over the world, there are violent conflicts over land: invasions and occupations. In the US, there is so much talk about our borders, and about immigrants, and particularly alarming lately, talk about citizenship. Many of those arguments seem so focused on difference that they ignore our common humanity. The words we use matter. The language we choose can strip a person’s
1050: To The Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall
Transcript
MAJOR: This fall, I spoke with listeners at the Twin Cities Book Festival about the place of poetry in their lives. This week, we’re sharing their stories.
A. RAFAEL: My name is A. Rafael Johnson. I am a writer and a teacher of creative writing.
I find poetry is vital. I find poetry is something I need because poetry has this wonderful ability to take us out of our daily lives, to sort of lift us out of y’know the daily grind of like “I gotta get up, I gotta get the kids to school, I gotta get on my commute, I gotta answer this email and go to this meeting” — and poetry can just take us out of that for a moment and reconnect us to what it means to be human, and it’s wonderful and very necessary.
It is finding language for an experience you’ve had but you haven’t been able to put into words yet. And with a lot of poetry, not all, but with a lot of poetry it captures sort of this moment, this corner of the human experience, that no one else has quite seen. And it lets us sort of step out of ourselves, and enter someone else’s — not their life, not their narrative, not the whole arc of their life, but that
Three years ago the American writer Kim Addonizio wrote a poem called To The Woman Crying Uncontrollably In The Next Stall.
It is a life-affirming message of hope, a declaration that however bad things may seem, someone — even a complete stranger — loves you. And, as the poem says in its final line, “joy is coming”.
It is much-read, much-admired, and has no doubt brought comfort to many during their darkest moments. But until recently, as far as one can tell, it has not been read out loud to a woman crying uncontrollably in the next stall.
Now, thanks to a young woman called Agnes Frimston it has. And the woman who was crying in the next-door loo cubicle is feeling very grateful.
Ms Frimston, who works for the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, was at a members’ club in Soho — the House at St Barnabas, which is also a charity supporting the homeless — when she visited the ladies. While there, she heard the sound of weeping from the adjoining cubicle. “I shouted over the door ‘Are you all right? Do you need a hug?’”
The woman said no, she was not all right: she was crying because her mother had died.
Ms Frimston, deputy editor of the institute’s ma
April 7, 2022: To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall, Kim Addonizio
To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall
Kim Addonizio
If you ever woke in your dress at 4 A.M. ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for one you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming
==
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