Transcript
A (0:00)
They put hot honey sauce on the snack wrap. McDonald's outdid themselves again. The classic snack wrap we all know and love paired with the sweet heat of hot honey sauce. Just what we needed to make it even more perfect. You know the drill, so go to McDonald's and try it today.
B (0:19)
Hey there, it's Maggie. For the next two weeks of episodes, the poet Sameer Bashir will be guest hosting the Slowdown. I hope you enjoy her selections and reflection. I'll return on February 18th.
C (0:41)
I'm Samia Bashir and this is the Slowdown. Born on October 27, I've been learning about scorpions all my life. Delicate but dangerous, these dark dwellers have long been central to our many mythologies. They are fragile. You can step on any of the smallest ones and kill it. But as Indiana Jones warned us, it's the smallest scorpions which are the most deadly. In truth, scorpions don't want to sting you. They want to be left alone. They aren't aggressive, they're reclusive and only tend to attack in self defense. Today's poem, in ways that I aspire to in my own writing life, manages to take a deep breath in and collapse 2000 years of danger into a single moment of misunderstanding. Blowing its notes, its bath of air, with the diaphragmatic power of an operatic diva, this poem walks our own missteps on the eight small feet and single stinging tail of a scorpion. Closing time is Khanderea by Bridget Peguin Kelly. It was not a scorpion I asked for. I asked for a fish. But maybe God misheard my request. Maybe God thought I said, not some sort of fish, but a scorpion fish, a request he would surely have granted, being a goodly God. But then he forgot the fish attached to the scorpion, because God too, forgets everything forgets. So instead of an edible fish, any small fish, sweet or sour, or even the grotesque buffoonery of the striped scorpion fish, crowned with spines and followed by many tails, a veritable sideshow of a fish. Instead of these, I was given an insect, a peculiar prehistoric creature, part lobster, part spider, part bellringer, part son of a fallen star, something like a disfigured armored dog, not a thing you can eat or even take on a meaningful walk, so ugly is it, so stiffly does it step as if on ice, freezing again and again in midair like a listening ear, and then scuttling backwards or leaping madly forward, its deadly tail doing a St. Vitus jig. God gave me a scorpion, a venomous creature, to be sure, a bug with the bite of Cleopatra's asp. But not, as I soon found out, despite the dark gossip, a lover of violence or a hater of men. In truth it is shy the scorpion, a creature with eight eyes and almost no sight, who shuns the daylight and is driven mad by fire, who favors the lonely spot and feeds on nothing much and only throws out its poison barb when backed against a wall. A thing like me, but not the thing I asked for, a thing by accident or design I am now attached to. And so I draw the curtains, and so I lay out strange dishes, and so I step softly, and so I do not speak. And only twice in many years have I been stung, both times because, unthinking, I let in the terrible light. And sometimes now, when I watch the scorpion sleep, I see how fine he is, how rare, this creature called Lung Book or Mortal Book, because of his strange organs of breath. His lungs are holes in his body which open and close, and inside the holes are stiffened membranes arranged like the pages of a book. Imagine that. And when the holes open, the pages rise up and unfold, and the blood that circles through them touches the air, and by this bath of air the blood is made pure. He is a house of books, my shy scorpion, carrying in his belly all the perishable manuscripts. A little mirror of the library at Alexandria, which burned. The Slowdown is a production of American Public Media in partnership with the Poetry Foundation. To get a poem delivered to you daily, go to slowdownshow.org and sign up for our newsletter and find us on Instagram @downdownshow and blueskylowdownshow.org. You.