Today’s episode is guest hosted by Samiya Bashir.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m Samiya Bashir, and this is The Slowdown. 

Born on October 27th, 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 two thousand 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; Iskandariya
by Brigit Pegeen 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 
bell-ringer, 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 mid-air 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.