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 turd,
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 orgasmic 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 shag 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.’
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