That Fly, Redux

Ron.

Dec 5

Here's an oldie, originally published almost 20 years ago in the (now defunct) online journal Conspire.

This piece is based on solid writing advice from Natalie Goldberg, who advises us thusly:

"A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive. If the writer wanders, the reader too will wander."
"Don't become self-absorbed, which eventually creates vague, muddy writing… Recognize the fly, even love it if you want, but don't marry it."

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I've Married The Fly

I should have been home
alone in the kitchen
heating and eating a burger
checking the blue flame
under the cast iron pan.
I should have been
watching the cheese melt
watching the marbled fat,
browned, sizzled into grease,
run down the side of the patty
like a lava flow off Mauna Loa,
infernal, inexorable, out
toward a flat black beach,
broiled from above and below.