Fly in A Glass Bowl
The fly arrived in the
lunch box
carried by the navigator.
It pulsed and buzzed
probing for a way out
of the Plexiglas bowl.
The spider tracked the Colonel
as he adjusted the bomb sight.
Squinting through cross-hairs
made of spider's webbing, weighing the moment the bomb
was to be released
in order to place the bomb inside a 100-foot circle
from four miles in the sky.
Crouched in the Plexiglas nose of the plane
breathing pure oxygen,
the Colonel wore silk gloves
to keep his skin from freezing
to the metal on the sight.
The fly buzzed around The Colonel’s head
as he released the bomb.
A cousin to the spider that spun the web
used in the cross hair in the bomb sight,
the spider focused on the fly
encouraging it to land
close enough to be trapped and devoured.
Making its sinister move just as the bomb burst above the Japanese
city,
the spider was blinded by the flash of the intense light
not seeing the gloved hand
of The Colonel
as it came down on its body,
still clutching the fly in its dark legs.
-tp, 4-27
-tp, 4-27
