Caleb A.P. Parker

Minor Confessions

We came home to hordes of docile houseflies glazed 

and quivering on our West Side duplex window sills. 

It was the day a fellow carrier had died.

We hadn’t known her well, and well, 

the flies. We killed them all. We sprayed them with Lysol, 

with 409. Dusk, I broke into the Peanut Factory Lofts 

and swam short laps in their short pool. 

It didn’t help me cry. A dead train 

blocked the tracks on the walk back home.

It would be another lie to say there was an open car,

to say: if there’d been an open car, 

I would have longed to crawl inside.

*

I’ve been noticing more flies these days,

these daily visits from two or three

who make landfall on my wrists, my knees, my eyebrows,

like now, as I try to tune this borrowed hollowbody.

I couldn’t tell you if I truly have this fear: that Baal-Zebub, 

or maybe a lesser one, has gained a foothold in my ribcage

or my soul, that this fly here—legs against my knuckle

like a lover’s eyelashes—could have hatched from within.

Please don’t tell it what I’ve done.

Baal was just the Ugaritic word for lord. And Zebub, it’s thought, a play  

on the original Zebul, a way to call the Canaanite’s god a bunch of dung. 

Mourning, I’ve learned now, attracts all kinds of flies.

I was one myself that night, back from the pool, 

the coupler hopped, guitar a shovel, the song 

that transfigured or fabricated her into a sister.

Caitlin Eliza McKenna