May 25, 2026On a day so hot not even the houseflywatching you can move,you notice its eyeballs almost favorthe shiny black domes that coverairport security cameras.The housefly’s compound eyeballslook like headlights wearing prescriptionCoke-bottle goggles in a violent heat.When your fingernail scrapes a lash or flakeof ash the size of a fat fly’s wing from your eye,it’s multiplied several thousand timesin the housefly’s eyes.The blackfly breeds in streams & riversduring the dog days of summer,but cannot survive on sadness like the housefly.Bubbles of good & bad air flare in individualhexagonal lenses known as ommatidia.Each ommatidium functions like an eye,but none sees spectrums of red or yellow.To the fly you are myriad mosaics of ultraviolet,gray, blue & green trichromatic visionsscraping something from your eye:a tear of oil or sweat in some ommatidia,a bud, a bead of mucus or blindness in others,a pearly, blurry larva recallingthe housefly’s first dog days on earth.When it’s this hot, you may also contendwith the horsefly, which is whatyou almost think the housefly iswhen you look at it.The fangs of horseflies tear the earsof the dog days. The sores shineon the ears of the dogs like diamonds.Dog days swarm the earth.Houseflies rise like small planesorbiting an inflamed, flammable planet.Houseflies rise out of maggots like fragments& figments & scabs & clouds of ash.Praise be to the one housefly that does not flee,the wind at bay gone violent.You cannot shoo the climate.You are multitudinous outlandish landscapes,which is to say, you are more than otherworldlyscraping & scratching the flake or lashitching your eye in the eyes of the fly.You cannot shoo the fly.