Jubilation of Flies

Chris Ellery

February 11, 2021

The fly that dallied with Mike Pence’s hair 

in misty and mellow October missed out  

on the feast of the new year’s Epiphany. 

Flies live more than a day, but not three months. 

Flies carry pathogens and parasites. They vomit  

and poop on food. But with their taste for corruption, 

they also solve crimes and help surgeons 

treat festering wounds by eating the rotting tissue. 

The fly that dallied with Mike Pence’s hair 

later laid hundreds of eggs. The hundreds of flies  

that emerged from pupae that morphed from larvae 

that hatched from those eggs each laid  

hundreds of eggs. And the hundreds and hundreds  

of flies—all descendants of the fly that dallied  

with Mike Pence’s hair—are keen for carrion  

to lay their thousands and thousands of eggs.  

Whatever the state of the country and world 

let humans rejoice in the gluttony of flies.  

Let the lying politicians rejoice! Let the mobs  

and insurrectionists, makers of corpses, rejoice! 

Is America already dead, sprawled as she fell 

across the wilderness of the continent? 

Blessed be the fly that dallied with Mike Pence’s hair, 

for she hath engendered generations of maggots  

to decompose America’s naked remains 

and perhaps to help discover her killer.  

Is America still alive, gangrenous,  

feverish, spitting blood? Can she survive? 

Surely there are flies enough to breed worms enough  

to bore deep in her lacerations, 

to consume the infection,  

to help us heal her wounded body. 

Chris Ellery is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Canticles of the Body. He teaches American literature and cinema at Angelo State University.