The scorpions always arrive at dawn. Gently, their pincers touch the cuts on my lips. I clutch the edges of the mattress, stare at the mirrored ceiling. My mouth opens, but no sound staggers out. The scorpions— dark green, dank— reach in, pull out the razor blade under my tongue...
Two scorpions. A razor blade. Slowly, in unison, without letting go of the metal, they move. A little guillotine making its way down my body. I remember dragging my thumb through his beard, coppery & difficult. The scorpions pause, tilt the blade. A threat, a reminder. It’s my task to stop yearning for as long as it takes them to carry a blade across my skin. My thoughts swerve from monsoon storms to accordions to pecan groves. The little guillotine starts moving again. I begin to sense the enormity of my body. The blade high in the air. For now.
"The emotions driving the poem are complex. Physical admiration, possibly attraction, is clearly present in the second line with its unexpected alliterative jolts—'his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome.' Alliteration is a Hopkins signature, of course, but it seems especially resonant in this poem—plainly audible, but never intrusive."
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"When I first saw the bandelette in the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, in Paris’s Marais district, I immediately experienced one of those Rilkean “bursts,” for here was an object, that in its ornate yet near-transparent being, invoked so much of the social, cultural and historic struggles of the Jews which are writ large across and infuse the whole of Western culture from earliest times through the rise of Christianity and the Church fathers, on up to the Shoah."
