Hey there, it's Maggie. For the next two weeks of episodes, the poet Samia Bashir will be guest hosting The Slowdown.

I hope you enjoy her selections and reflection. I'll return on February 18th.

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 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 Pigeen 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 sun of a fallen star,

...