Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

I have always been interested in how we see ourselves in other animals. The way someone can glimpse a horse or a bird and suddenly be reminded of themselves. Or maybe reminded of what they are not.

Just before the weather turned and when it was still nice enough to do yoga on my screened-in porch, I saw a beetle cross my yoga mat.

He was a small beetle, nothing too scary or intimidating, and I watched him for some time, careful not to crush him accidentally. I do my best not to harm bugs if I can help it, though some spiders get the worst of my surprised fear and a quick whack without thinking about it. But that day, I was content to let the beetle be.

Multiple times, the beetle crawled on my mat, until once when it nearly crawled onto my face, and without thinking I flicked him off, as gently as I could. To my horror, he landed directly into a spider's web that I hadn’t seen under the patio bricks. I had worked so hard to save him and then, before I could even realize it, the spider got to work.

It felt like some disastrous metaphor. But it also seemed a much more natural way to die. I didn’t kill the beetle, but I’m pretty sure that spider did.

Life is like that sometimes, you are both the beetle and the spider, and the web is the world we live in. Perhaps it was inevitable. What happens is what happens.

In today’s imaginative poem, we see what happens when the speaker witnesses a beetle at a gas station.

Prayer of the Palo Verde Beetle
by Felicia Zamora

I watch a Palo Verde beetle on its back, flail tibia spurs & tarsi & antenna
next to the gas station pump. Heat of crude oil, of carbon atoms in
absorption; heat of desert in August suffocates my thighs & sweat runs
course of my legs in frozen witness. I am spiracles pin pricking a body
trying to breathe. I am elytra to cement. I carry migration in my scutum:
a song unraveling over generation after generation & yet a border weighs
on mind & mandible, a bullseye on my back, on the backs of those of us
who sing across imaginary lines with inherited wings. Goose flesh exists
before ticker tape, before the shooter, before brown bodies agape &
words consume & images consume & we look to the sky for semblance
of song & a wall becomes a scalpel in rip across abdomen of continent 
which first born an entrance, a womb. I am compound eye meeting
brown irises in firmament. I am cloud-cover prayer. Foot in reach to turn 
over & I collapse in a nation’s hesitation. I am pupils in drill, aghast. 

"Prayer of the Palo Verde Beetle" by Felicia Zamora, from I ALWAYS CARRY THE BONES by Felicia Zamora copyright © 2021. Used by permission of University of Iowa Press.