“Honeyed siphon:” as in, you catch
more flies with; my ferocity
in the shower thrusting vanilla lye
upon miniscule, heaving wings surprises
my catch. I teach it the cruelty of wrong
place, wrong time.

Once, picking papery bits of cocoon accidentally
crushed beneath my tiny thumb, my bashful mother
stilled my hands with a girlhood
story: she’d plucked like forget-me-nots
the thready legs of spiders, one
by one.

Sweetness can be deceiving;
voted twice nicest girl at bible school,
my shoulders, hunched with sin, attracted hands
like crumpled butterflies to the stinking sap
of lilies, the church ladies urging God
to catch me in his healing arms.

We lay traps for Him: scraps of King’s
Hawaiian rolls and Dixie cups sloshing
with red wine, dousing via my stomach
my soul, syrupy
with penitence. I don’t want
to kill the fly, only baptize it

in sugar water, to siphon its buzzing heart
into my sticky trap and back out, alive
but now bitterly aware
of my ambivalence, as if to ask
as it alights: why would anyone care
to catch a fly?

—Jennifer Jussel

Poet’s Instagram

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