| Flypaper After you’ve killed us with your disbelief, we’ll be reincarnated. It’ll be me and the three boys in your New York apartment kitchen— that’s us, the four houseflies, stuck to the curling yellow strip of flypaper, dangling helpless little circles above the bread and butter. You’ll walk in and stroke the cat, put a book next to the butter. We’ll strain our little compound eyes, recognize the names of who we were. We’ll sigh our little fly sighs and wish we were the cat. But we’ll just have to be grateful that you didn’t squash us, that you didn’t pin us between the yellow lead paint and a rolled up Entertainment Weekly. | French
I loved the frills of it— le français— The fancy vowel contortions, ridiculous yet undeniably sophisticated, like high fashion. The prim and constricted “u” closely accompanied by a languorish nasal, slack and resonating, resembling a moan of either passion or ennui, for instance in the word “fondu.” Alluring mélange: the lack of care in the toss of a hand barely holding a cigarette, the boredom and lust of nonchalant breasts, yet suddenly the firm insistence upon perfection— like a finely crafted bustier with small stitching— ever fluxing between tension and release. |
