the housefly is what you want.
gnats, they’re just morsels. starvation rations.
you can eat all the gnats you can catch,
and they’ll never be enough.
at night, you can go down and see if you
can catch yourself a baby roach or something.
there’s earwigs. but they don’t come around often,
and they’re a lot of trouble. those big pincers
on their tails. segmented armor so they can
swing their tails right over their heads
the way scorpions do—arachne save me from
scorpions—and if you ask me,
i don’t think they taste all that good.
no, give me housefly, succulent and fat.
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
i am not making a fresh cup of coffee to replace
this fresh cup of coffee just because some stupid fly
flew in to float parboiled on the steamy surface.
if the coffee is hot enough to kill that fly
(and it’s dead, see? stupid fly), it’s hot enough to kill whatever
was on that fly, and if it isn’t, then whatever was on that
fly is in the coffee and will have to take its chances
in my stomach’s hydrochloric acid; though i will take
a fork and remove the carcass, careful not to break anything off.
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“I must confess that I do not understand why things are so arranged, that women should seize us by the nose as deftly as they do the handle of a teapot. Either their hands are so constructed or else our noses are good for nothing else.” Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, “How the Two Ivans Quarreled,” Taras Bulba and Other Tales (trans. various)