Gadfly by Jehanne Dubrow

After Robert Hass

Many days, for a few months last year,
my friend would call to ask if I
had taken my alprazolam, which stilled
the panicked wings inside my chest.
They were pills the size of larvae.
I broke them in half like tiny bodies
split, laid a piece on my tongue
and swallowed with my own spit.
Early afternoons. I paced from porch
to living room, traveling miles of floor.
My friend’s voice on the phone was a net—
she caught me in my movements.
I hear her speaking now and remember
the nervous flying of my hands.
I must have sounded to her like a thing
that buzzes as it nears the dying
light above a door. I took the pills
or didn’t—depending on how much
I’d closed my eyes the night before,
trapped in the clear bottle
of sleep and no way of getting out.
Difficult to describe my disquiet,
except to say my fingers hovered
between the slats of window blinds,
opening a small exit on the street.
I think of the ancient story—the girl
who fled desire lowing in a field,
knowing the gods transform us
out of love or loathing, foot become hoof
and the delicate brow given horns,
stung and stung by a fly, how she cried
for the red welts that mean living.
Hunched with the phone to my ear,
I bit a pill to powder. My friend talked
and listened, listened and talked.
And I, was I the weeping or the stinging,
Io or insect, pursuing myself through
the iridescent cruelty of that year.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of six poetry collections, including most recently Dots &
Dashes, winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award. Her work has
appeared in Pleiades, New England Review, and Southern Review. She is an associate professor at the
University of North Texas.