The Stories The Flies Tell About Us

have behemoths in them roaring loud as a million buzzings,
colossal larvae in hard-shelled eggs with doors
that let us move in and out to feed, our teeth
great eyes of bone, the size of an adult squished flat
by the hand of God, which comes to the fly out of nowhere,
multi-colored, many fingered, webbed on a stick,
that petal of death that makes antennae quiver.
Once a rolling egg took an uncle out of the sky – just like that!
And if one of our young comes thundering
down off its unsteady tree stump legs,
they’re out proclaiming: Make ready, hover, make ready
for the abundance of sweet eruptions!
Days and days and days a-hum with pungent sustenance!
Huzzah, they say, to find an eye and go for a swim!
Our future is all desert and violent winds.
It is burning sun and thirst.
There will come a great dying off,
and a gradual returning to what once it was.
What an honor to be the clean up crew!
God will be so full of death by then,
he’ll close his hands forever,
they promise their maggoty kinder.
That’s when we enter the rotting time glory,
followed by the sugar always bliss.

Eileen Moeller lives in center city Philadelphia, PA. She has poems in Paterson Literary Review, SugarMule, Ars Medica, and forthcoming in Schuykill Valley Review. Access her blog: And So I Sing at http://eileenmoeller.blogspot.com/

Leave a Reply