‘Procession of Flies’
— Nix Thérèse
I wasn’t expecting to reach a strange and complex view of a relationship in such a short poem, but ‘Procession of Flies’ pleasantly surprised me with its compelling images. We reach lyric strangeness pretty early when the sow’s head begins speaking sans tongue: “a butcher’s fever isn’t for gold, but for the long hours in darkness.” The darkness could be the animal’s body that hasn’t yet been sorted into cuts of meat or the bed in which the butcher sleeps, but either way, I imagined the butcher swallowed. This line implies that even those who make a living off conquering still not only find, but desire a place in which they can surrender. Even the butcher who spends their day destroying bodies still longs for a space where the lack of light reduces everything to one texture, one plane of existence—all blotted out.
The speaker encounters a much different view than the butcher’s: “I fish out the bougainvillea petals from the aqueduct / and let the casinos slip away into daylight.” These fragile petals can only fall apart further, losing their pop of pink when they dry & brown or staining when they’re crushed. They entice most when they’re attached to a branch or floating in the wind—overtaking the landscape instead of being overtaken by the canal. Yet the speaker only reaches them when they’re already lost, weighing down this water. Likewise, the casinos are best lit up, so it’s no surprise that the daylight easily obscures the building that can no longer rely on fluorescents to invite. If we loop back to the title, the “procession of flies” knows that appearance isn’t the only appeal. Rather they’re drawn to the exposed core and the rot left uncovered, clinging onto the last bits of meat with their lives. They save what they can, much like the speaker in this seemingly barren location.
These concepts of decay and loss come together most interestingly in the last lines: “when we see the cassette’s black ribbon… you ask, “‘Baby, do you think I could have been someone?’ / your body tumbling miles down the road.” This sentence construction blends both the past and present, eternally connecting this question with the loss. We lose the you before the answer is even fresh on the speaker’s lips, before the you can believe their life is more than just basic. Yet the whole landscape is stained with their presence.