Anna Evans

FRUIT FLIES*

A pear mottles in a bowl; fruit
flies speckle the kitchen air.
They fogged the tank
in our old Science classroom
as we transcribed their genus–Drosophila.

We knocked the insects out
in fume-stoppered vials,
sexed them to breed in lidded jars;
two weeks later we tweezed
a generation, counted
the pale-eyed males,
and re-opened the text at Hemophilia.

This page we knew: our classmate
Mike and his garrisoned veins,
the hospital stripes we envied
until he missed the yearbook--
his routine treatment a gamble–
lost to a bag of dirty blood.

I tumble the pear into the trash.
Thirty years and several livers on,
Mike measures out life on a drip. His red
headed daughters share the visitor's chair.
Above their pale brows swarm
probabilities–a cloud of fruit flies
too small to swat.

*Previously published in Something Close to Beautiful.

Anna Evans’ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Harvard Review, Rattle and Measure. She is the editor of The Barefoot Muse, and gained her MFA from Bennington College. Her chapbook Swimming is available from Maverick Duck Press.