There's a Poem in That

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 On this podcast, host and award-winning poet Todd Boss helps strangers discover the poetry in their most intimate stories. 

In this episode, SB, from Greensboro, NC, leaves a voicemail asking Todd to help her express forgiveness for Joe, the boyfriend who tried to kill her as a teenager. 

A note for sensitive listeners: This episode contains a few brief scenes of domestic violence. 

00:00 SB leaves a message… Todd welcomes you to the episode

01:20 They were kids… we learn about SB and Joe, and their childhood love story

03:25 SB recalls the best of times with Joe

05:30 Too serious too fast…the couple’s toxicity turns violent, but SB belonged

08:23 One incident in SB’s car leads to voicemail stalking… and an ambush

11:20 Determined… despite a restraining order, Joe breaks in, attacks, is apprehended

15:23 His public defender would not like him… Joe gets four years… SB finds listeners

17:50 Collect call from prison… SB realizes her role… sees it from Joe’s POV

19:20 Living in fear… column for the local paper includes a photo… a letter comes

21:20 Seeing less in black-and-white… I can love so much more expansively now

24:24 SB hopes Joe knows she’s forgiven him… getting back to love

27:35 Todd’s poem, written for SB: “Pure Love Is Where This Is All Going, That’s What Powers the Universe”

33:30 End credits and SB’s reactions to the poem’s themes

“Shall we go, you and I, while we can, through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?” is from “Dark Star” by the Grateful Dead. 

Producers: Hila Plitmann, Todd Boss. Editing: Clare Wiley. Final mix: Ben O’Brien. Music by Esh Whitacre. Special thanks to sensitivity reader Mallory Capri Henson. 

If you think there’s an unwritten poem in your story, leave a message for Todd at 808-300-0449, and you could be TAPIT’s next guest. 

#forgiveness #redemption #arttherapy #criminaljustice #domesticviolencerecovery #darkstargratefuldead #expansivelove #learningtolove #chooselove

TAPIT is listener supported. Listeners like you help make TAPIT's services available FREE to anyone who calls the listener line. Join the movement and get bonus content available nowhere else, by contributing as little as $1 a month, here.

Some contributors support the show at $5,000 a year, assuring TAPIT's continued growth as nonprofit arts organization with vision. To join these visionaries, visit us here, or send a message to [email protected]. 

Read the poems and access more bonus content at poeminthat.com. Or shop our merch!

Is there an unwritten poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line, and tell him why: 808-300-0449.

Follow TAPIT on Facebook.

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Todd goes on a community radio station to explain some of the magic that is TAPIT, for an audience of poets and poetry lovers. 

CHAPTERS 

1      LIVE ON AIR: Todd tees up a conversation 

2      (6:24) The (dollar?) value of poetry

3      (10:37) The heart of poetry isn’t books

4      (14:34) Sting reminds us

5      (15:45) The role of the empathic poet in society

6      (18:23) Channeling (Hi, Dylan!) out of ourselves

7      (21:32) Accessibility as a storytelling journey

8      (24:11) Todd reads two new poems

TAPIT is listener supported. Listeners like you help make TAPIT's services available FREE to anyone who calls the listener line. Join the movement and get bonus content available nowhere else, by contributing as little as $1 a month, here.

Some contributors support the show at $5,000 a year, assuring TAPIT's continued growth as nonprofit arts organization with vision. To join these visionaries, visit us here, or send a message to [email protected]. 

Read the poems and access more bonus content at poeminthat.com. Or shop our merch!

Is there an unwritten poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line, and tell him why: 808-300-0449.

Follow TAPIT on Facebook.

Send us Fan Mail

In this bonus behind-the-scenes episode of TAPIT, Alexa (Episode 15) gets her poem "Blessing" revealed to her in a largely unedited session, shared with her permission. In it, you'll get a chance to see what it's like for guests to have their  last interviews with Todd. Every conversation is different, and every guest is a blessing, but there are always surprises and revelations along the way. If you'd like a poem to help you make meaning of something in your life, tell Todd about it at 808-300-0449. 

TAPIT is listener supported. Listeners like you help make TAPIT's services available FREE to anyone who calls the listener line. Join the movement and get bonus content available nowhere else, by contributing as little as $1 a month, here.

Some contributors support the show at $5,000 a year, assuring TAPIT's continued growth as nonprofit arts organization with vision. To join these visionaries, visit us here, or send a message to [email protected]. 

Read the poems and access more bonus content at poeminthat.com. Or shop our merch!

Is there an unwritten poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line, and tell him why: 808-300-0449.

Follow TAPIT on Facebook.

Send us Fan Mail

When Alexa loses her mother to a sudden heart attack on Mother’s Day—just one year after her father dies of cancer—grief doesn’t arrive as a single blow, but as a cascade. At 23, she becomes a de facto parent to her teenage brother alongside her younger sister, the three of them bound together by loss, responsibility, and a fragile, hard-won love.

Alexa’s story moves through the complexity of mourning two very different parents: a deeply optimistic, spiritually driven father whose mantra—think positive—still echoes, and a mother whose long struggle with alcoholism left behind both compassion and unresolved pain. As Alexa reckons with identity, faith, and the aftershocks of an abusive relationship, she begins to rebuild: through community, sobriety, grief work, and a renewed relationship with God.

Across months of conversation, a portrait emerges—not of someone lost, but someone actively finding her way. In the end, the poem she thought she needed becomes something else: not a map out of grief, but a blessing forward. A father’s voice, refracted through a stranger, reminding her that the life she’s building—grounded in love, responsibility, and choice—is already its own kind of answer.

CHAPTERS

1. Mother’s Day
Alexa gets the call no one is prepared for, and within hours she and her siblings are standing in a hospital room, clinging to each other as a new understanding takes hold: it will be the three of them now.

2. When Loss Compounds
Just a year earlier, their father died of cancer. As even more family members pass in close succession, Alexa feels like the ground beneath her life is continually giving way, forcing her into adulthood faster than expected.

3. The Three of Us
At just 23, Alexa steps into a role she never imagined, helping to raise her teenage brother alongside her younger sister. Together, they form a fragile but determined unit, learning how to divide responsibility, resolve conflict, and become each other’s anchor in a world unmoored.

4. What Remains of Them
Alexa struggles to juggle contrasting legacies of her parents: her father’s relentless positivity and spiritual conviction, and her mother’s complicated battle with alcoholism. Grief becomes tangled with identity, faith, and unanswered questions—especially the kind that come from loving someone you couldn’t save.

5. Patterns We Inherit
Alexa begins to see how her parents’ fractured marriage shaped her understanding of love, a blueprint that followed her into an abusive relationship of her own. Breaking free, she is choosing herself for the first time.

6. Finding a Way Forward
Months later, small but meaningful changes begin to take hold as Alexa turns toward healing—through grief groups, Al-Anon, and a growing sense of purpose. She begins to imagine a future in health and life coaching.

7. Faith, Reclaimed
In an unexpected turn, Alexa reconnects with spirituality, discovering a version of faith that feels expansive rather than divisive. 

8. The Blessing
Todd's poem, "Blessing,"—woven around her father’s own handwritten words—lands not as an answer to grief, but as an affirmation of the path she’s on. 

Support the show

TAPIT is listener supported. Listeners like you help make TAPIT's services available FREE to anyone who calls the listener line. Join the movement and get bonus content available nowhere else, by contributing as little as $1 a month, here.

Some contributors support the show at $5,000 a year, assuring TAPIT's continued growth as nonprofit arts organization with vision. To join these visionaries, visit us here, or send a message to [email protected]. 

Read the poems and access more bonus content at poeminthat.com. Or shop our merch!

Is there an unwritten poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line, and tell him why: 808-300-0449.

Follow TAPIT on Facebook.

Send us Fan Mail

Support the show

TAPIT is listener supported. Listeners like you help make TAPIT's services available FREE to anyone who calls the listener line. Join the movement and get bonus content available nowhere else, by contributing as little as $1 a month, here.

Some contributors support the show at $5,000 a year, assuring TAPIT's continued growth as nonprofit arts organization with vision. To join these visionaries, visit us here, or send a message to [email protected]. 

Read the poems and access more bonus content at poeminthat.com. Or shop our merch!

Is there an unwritten poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line, and tell him why: 808-300-0449.

Follow TAPIT on Facebook.

Send us Fan Mail

He broke a man's jaw to go undefeated on national TV—and felt nothing.

Think Mike Lee’s pro boxing career looks like a dream? Inside the ring, yes, he was impressive. But outside of it, the pros and cons weren't passing weigh-ins.

"You'd think that someone who punched other people in the face for a living would want to do a podcast about poems, but ... here we are."

In this episode of There’s a Poem in That, we follow Mike through the final bout of his boxing career—and the invisible fight that was already well underway. What emerges is a story about more than sport. It’s about the addiction to intensity, the emotional crash that follows achievement, and the quiet ways identity can become tied to performance.

"I'm actually ironically an extremely empathetic, un-confrontational person."

Over years of competition, Mike chased the feeling that winning was supposed to bring. But the highs didn’t last. The lows got lower. And eventually, his body began to break down in ways no one could fully explain—until a diagnosis of Lyme disease helped make sense of the pain, exhaustion, and confusion that had been shaping his career all along.

His retirement didn’t end the fight—it only changed it.

In highlights from 3 hours of intimate interview, you'll hear about:

•  The psychology of high performance and adrenaline 
•  Depression and emotional flat-lining after success 
•  Chronic illness and invisible symptoms 
•  Losing an identity built since childhood 
•  Redefining masculinity, vulnerability, and fatherhood 

At the center is a quieter question: If you’re not what you achieve… who are you?

And what happens when you no longer need to prove you're enough?

If this episode resonates, share it with someone who’s been chasing a high—and leave a review with the line that stayed with you.

Support the show

TAPIT is listener supported. Listeners like you help make TAPIT's services available FREE to anyone who calls the listener line. Join the movement and get bonus content available nowhere else, by contributing as little as $1 a month, here.

Some contributors support the show at $5,000 a year, assuring TAPIT's continued growth as nonprofit arts organization with vision. To join these visionaries, visit us here, or send a message to [email protected]. 

Read the poems and access more bonus content at poeminthat.com. Or shop our merch!

Is there an unwritten poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line, and tell him why: 808-300-0449.

Follow TAPIT on Facebook.

Send us Fan Mail

A love expert's love life inspires a poem that just might become a lifelong companion. In this intimate exchange conducted over the course of ten months, Brooke brings us along on the roller coaster of her dating life, all the while attempting to locate the heart of the problem. Todd finds the soul of it. 

Support the show

TAPIT is listener supported. Listeners like you help make TAPIT's services available FREE to anyone who calls the listener line. Join the movement and get bonus content available nowhere else, by contributing as little as $1 a month, here.

Some contributors support the show at $5,000 a year, assuring TAPIT's continued growth as nonprofit arts organization with vision. To join these visionaries, visit us here, or send a message to [email protected]. 

Read the poems and access more bonus content at poeminthat.com. Or shop our merch!

Is there an unwritten poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line, and tell him why: 808-300-0449.

Follow TAPIT on Facebook.

Send us Fan Mail

Part 1 of a 3-part "upside-down" episode! 

This upside-down 3-part edition of TAPIT opens on a poem, and ends on a dream. When Todd knocks on a stranger’s door to deliver a poem he wrote about the occupant three years ago when he lived across the street from her, a surprising friendship unfolds. 

Support the show

TAPIT is listener supported. Listeners like you help make TAPIT's services available FREE to anyone who calls the listener line. Join the movement and get bonus content available nowhere else, by contributing as little as $1 a month, here.

Some contributors support the show at $5,000 a year, assuring TAPIT's continued growth as nonprofit arts organization with vision. To join these visionaries, visit us here, or send a message to [email protected]. 

Read the poems and access more bonus content at poeminthat.com. Or shop our merch!

Is there an unwritten poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line, and tell him why: 808-300-0449.

Follow TAPIT on Facebook.

Send us Fan Mail

Part 2 of a 3-part "upside-down" episode! 

This upside-down 3-part edition of TAPIT opens on a poem, and ends on a dream. When Todd knocks on a stranger’s door to deliver a poem he wrote about the occupant three years ago when he lived across the street from her, a surprising relationship unfolds. 

Support the show

TAPIT is listener supported. Listeners like you help make TAPIT's services available FREE to anyone who calls the listener line. Join the movement and get bonus content available nowhere else, by contributing as little as $1 a month, here.

Some contributors support the show at $5,000 a year, assuring TAPIT's continued growth as nonprofit arts organization with vision. To join these visionaries, visit us here, or send a message to [email protected]. 

Read the poems and access more bonus content at poeminthat.com. Or shop our merch!

Is there an unwritten poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line, and tell him why: 808-300-0449.

Follow TAPIT on Facebook.

Send us Fan Mail

Part 3 of a 3-part "upside-down" episode! 

This upside-down 3-part edition of TAPIT opens on a poem, and ends on a dream. When Todd knocks on a stranger’s door to deliver a poem he wrote about the occupant three years ago when he lived across the street from her, a surprising relationship unfolds. 

Support the show

TAPIT is listener supported. Listeners like you help make TAPIT's services available FREE to anyone who calls the listener line. Join the movement and get bonus content available nowhere else, by contributing as little as $1 a month, here.

Some contributors support the show at $5,000 a year, assuring TAPIT's continued growth as nonprofit arts organization with vision. To join these visionaries, visit us here, or send a message to [email protected]. 

Read the poems and access more bonus content at poeminthat.com. Or shop our merch!

Is there an unwritten poem in your story? Leave Todd a voicemail on our Haiku, Hawaii, listener line, and tell him why: 808-300-0449.

Follow TAPIT on Facebook.