1453: Closing Time; Iskandariya by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

I'm Simia 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 2,000 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 Condoria by Bridget Pagin 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 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 at slowdownshow and bluesky at slowdownshow.org. What will the American home look like 100 years from now? Building Tomorrow is a special episode from This Old House Radio Hour and Marketplace Morning Report that explores how we're building homes in a changing world. From wildfire-resistant homes out west to microfactories in Massachusetts where homes are constructed in months, and even tiny home communities in Texas. This special investigates breakthrough transformations and how we build homes for the 21st century. You can listen to this episode now by searching for This Old House Radio Hour in your podcast app.