For a week
a blue fly
buzzed around our apartment
subsisting on our Pomchi’s water,
kibble
and kitchen counter crumbs
and dodging attempts
by my wife to swat it.

I used to catch flies
quite easily in my palm
and release them back
to their natural estates
but since my colon surgery
the bugs are always winning.

Today,
there was a grey spider,
maybe a brown recluse,
silently gazing
at the bathtub drain.
I could not find a container
to capture it,
so I turned on the faucet
to the lowest cold
and highest flow
and watched the creepy crawly
circle the drain three times
before it vanished
into the mercies
of the Chattanooga sewers.

I was convinced  
that it could survive
by rafting itself  
onto to the nearest ****,
both a source
of refuge and sustenance,
that my Puerto Rican
family of Marine Tigers
living in Miami
(at the time
when Castro refugees
all mythically made
the 330 mile trip
on ten fallen coconut palms
thatched together,
and audaciously declared
eight street,” Calle Ocho”
and their new land,” Little Havana”)
contemptuously called,
back in my racist youth,
a “floating Cuban.”

When I came into the bedroom
my wife was waving around
her big brand-new blue fly swatter,
the one she bought at Dollar Tree.

Our Pomchi, also on the bed,
resting on her back
with her legs up in the air
and stomach joyfully exposed
was barking for a good hard belly rub.

Whack, whack, whack
went the fly swatter,
squarely hitting our little girl
in her sweet spot,
generating ******* squeals.

The blue fly,  
affectionately    
called Mike Pence
for its habit of landing
unnoticed on
any old white thing for
two minute and three seconds,
and now, a visiting family member
that had overextended its stay
more days than
were humanely bearable,
was buzzing around my wife’s head.

Its movement was noticeably slower
and when it landed on the faux leather arm
of my multi position reclining chair,
I was almost able to snag it in my palm.
Too tired to buzz afar,
it rested again on the arm,
weakly regurgitating its own spittle.

I called my wife over,  
a former professional chef
and therefore an expert
in the art of
preparing, cooking and eating
dead things,
knowing she be eager to try out
her new instrument of death.

A sure aim sent the Blue
to the skin colored **** carpet,
and in its last struggle
I started to sing inside the only
song that would be
a proper elegy:

La cu-ca- | ra-cha, la cu-ca-ra-cha
| ya no pue-de ca-mi-nar
por-que no | tie-ne, por-que le fal-tan
| las dos pa- titas "de" a-trás. —

("The cockroach, the cockroach /
can no longer walk /
because she doesn't have, because she lacks / the two hind legs to walk.”)

I imagined it
crying out
“Help me! Help me!”
like the half human,
half insect creature
caught in the spider web
at the end of that
old Vincent Price
creature feature
were death by big rock
was a mercy
compared to
arachnoid decapitation.

Whack
and the Blue’s head
was severed
from its thorax.
Whack
and its wings
flew East and West.
Whack
and its abdomen
closely followed.
Whack
and its legs
buckled under it.
Whack
a final time
to make sure
it was dead.  

My wife had
over-killed,
and the worst
cardinal sin,
had over-cooked
something that
was meant
to be tartare.

Still our Pomchi
sniffed, licked
and eventually ate
the Blue,
her smile
declaring it
the best thing
she swallowed
all week.  

For a half hour
my wife rewarded her
with the swat, swat, swat
of blue belly rubs.  

Note:
Marine Tiger was the ship that carried people from Puerto Rico, and so the white people in New York started calling all the Puerto Rican people ‘Marine Tigers.’

The town exists in harsh geometry,
the forest— a fiery flow.

The wolf leaps above their soul,
a crescent moon.

Run the wolf.
Flee the wolf.

Don’t go beyond the wall
lest you be devoured.

When the wolf howls
they make work their prayer,
their protection.

They pray a whole Bible
before the night comes.

The wolf howls away.
The villagers toil in their dreams.

They pray away in their cells
knowing the Lord Protector

and the Hunter keep them all safe
and from walking freely

with the wolves
of the forest.

She didn’t want this wedding dress
to be a widow,
alone,
encased in plastic
in the unused dark
of the closet,
moved after spring cleaning
to the basement
near the leaky window,
after five years
moth-balled to the
old unopened hope chest
of her mother’s closet,
weeping, weeping, weeping
for the man she lost,
subsisting on hope angels,
decaying, yellowing
a luminescent ghost,
a ******,
never to be worn,
never to be adored,
never to be passionately wanted,
just praying, praying, praying
and attracting only moths.

Wait, wait, wait,
after all these years,
it’s the granddaughter
touching it,
measuring it,
sizing it up
and seeing it
doesn’t fit her dreams.
will never
fit her dreams
and putting it back
without a second thought.

The grandmother
touches it yellow lace
and realizes it’s not
good enough,
worthy enough
to donate to
the local goodwill.

She doesn’t have the
heart to put it in the trash
and the scavenging fury
of the gulls and crows at the dump,
or cut it into cleaning rags.

It’s too old to go back
to the closet.
and the hope chest
is overstuffed already.

She takes it outside
in the bright clear light
and places it on the concrete pad,
douses it with gasoline
of the highest octane
and throws,
the last cigarette
she will ever smoke
defiantly, sadly on it.

She watches it return to the sky
in  candolescent congratulations.

As the moon dips behind
Earth’s faint outer shadow
in penumbral eclipse
an imperceptible darkness
seizes my soul in fear

I wait futilely,
like the ancients,
for the next
blood red cycle
to engulf the world
in ignorance and violence,
the next monster
to bite the earth
into a crescent slice.

They once watched
Luna dance
before Apollo
and gift him
her halo.

Now it’s
just the umbra,
the wispy white haze
shining in the daytime sky
left behind
when the new moon
glides in front
of the sun.

She dances alone,
the black child
in the yellow dress.

Alone amongst
the black and white oxfords,
the ivory Buster Browns,
the brown penny loafers
with smiling Abe Lincoln’s
looking up to her
from the confines
of their penny keepers.

Her white socks touch
the polished mahogany
hopping silently to
the beats of Chuck Berry
and Johnny B. Goode

She imagines hearing
her name in the lyrics:
Go go go
Go Joanie go go go
Go Joanie go go go
Go Joanie go go go
Go Joanie go go go
Joanie B. Goode.

She is loose but precise,
careful not to leave a mark,
correcting every footfall
with the more perfect
ballerina form
she saw once in
a Moira Shearer feature,
the one where the dancer
dies in the final act.

In the background she hears
the white throng under the
blue and white stripe panels
of the Republic Theater
dance to their own rules
a mess of governance that
obeys its own inane logic.

But then not one of them
had to sneak in through
the backstage door
when her brother, Marcus
chickened out at the first
“******” spited his way,
denying Joanie
even the indignity
of a colored only entrance.  

At the still point
between the lyrics Joan
finds the real dance,
the one intent on hiding
a choreography of grief,
a sadness, a defiance
she shares only
with her shadow.

She imagines herself
a joyous, living, wondrous
thing at play,
a girl reborn into a woman,
a dancer over America.

The music is the scent in the air
that changes everything.

“I’ve got no time to lie,
I’ve got no time to play your silly games,”

it croons with a sweet she reggae lilt
pairing off the lovers from the pretenders,

shedding bodies to kiss and writhe
in adjacent rooms or the nearest alley

until only the a cappella
is left in the haze of ****

and turntable revolutions,
the scent of spicy ****
marinated in a calypso afternoon.

There be time for Marley and
his Small Axe vibe after they be gone,

the Rasta boys with their black power
rave, body slamming each other.

It’s all be a silly game, man-
a ***** dream to knowing Jah.

They be warriors until the last spin,
and it be time to turn spear to

that big mama cross they forever carry
and must fold to fit on the bus.

My mother wanted me to go away.
I hardly sent her anything.
From behind, we all look alike.