by Nick Kisse

One night, you whispered through drool on the pillow: 

The Venus flytrap deserves your fucking respect.

 

And after wrapping my empty hand around yours, I stopped to think 

about it. How the flytrap’s pointed mouth is a slatted window, 

 

letting its prey see the outside but never letting it go. And the cruelness 

of carnivorous plants - letting ants, beetles, and adolescent slugs

 

see everything they’ll leave behind at the end of their little insect 

lives. Never heading back to their little insect homes. To their little insect 

 

husbands. To their little insect children – 332 girls and 486 boys. In the little insect 

part of town that is just middle-class enough to impress their little insect in-laws. 

 

Never again meeting their little insect spouse down the road at the little insect bar. 

Never drinking little insect shots of little insect tequila with a splash of lime.

 

Never having the thought to hold on to those little insect moments 

before they dissolve in the enzymes of the flytrap’s slatted mouth. 

 

And at that point, I really did feel bad for all the little insects who stumbled 

into the flytrap, unaware. Bound to it for the rest of their brief lives.

 

But lying next to you, our fingers loosely intertwined like its fangs,

I can respect the flytrap, too. I've never been a fan of letting go.