Mr. Rogers Kills Fruit Flies

poems by

Scott Ferry

ISBN: 978-1-59948-825-7, 52 pages, $13 (+ shipping)

Release Date: October 22, 2020

The Advance Sale Discount price of $8 expired September 22, 2020.

Check Payment:

For those who prefer to pay by check, the price is $17/book (which includes shipping and applicable sales tax) and should be sent to:

Main Street Rag
PO BOX 690100
Charlotte, NC 28227-7001

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN. In former lives, he taught high school and practiced acupuncture. His work can be found in Cultural Weekly, Cathexis NW, and Mac Queen’s Quinterly, among many others. He was a finalist in the Write Bloody Chapbook Contest in 2019. His first collection The only thing that makes sense is to grow was published in early 2020. He attempts to be handsome enough for his beautiful wife and energetic enough for his ebullient children.

Scott Ferry’s second collection instructs and entertains with curious hypotheticals, the wonderment of storytelling and divine explorations grounded in arbitrary rules. Playful, at times surreal and imbued with delicate imagery and heart, Ferry has fun with the music of language. Engaging, illuminating and generous of spirit, this group of poems should be relished and preserved. ~Arminé Iknadossian, author of All That Wasted Fruit

Scott Ferry takes readers on a madcap voyage wherein senses and settings are swapped, celebrities wrestle intriguing dilemmas to find illumination in darkrooms and kitchens. Science battles art, mind empowers body, and all is aglow with linguistic surprises. Ferry flexes his lexicon muscles throughout, whether facing the unfathomable, grinning tongue-tied across universe of sad ghosts and neighboring sasquatch, or exploring means of achieving divinity. He’s in control, so enjoy this ambitiously surreal, richly rewarding ride. ~Gary Glauber

Gabriel García Márquez changes a diaper

Leche asada hands stop typing,
surnames roll back into fingerprints. I lift
the crying boy out of the burning pot of sancocho,
gently wipe the ants from his buttocks. The boy’s mouth

sails in blue water, his nose inhales five years with each wail.
I have seen a thin girl float into the air near the jacaranda tree.
It is not necessary to believe. The histories populate the floor
with massacres and bagre fish flapping like dead words.

I string the gold veins to form corporal masses around bone.
And this room only half stands, as my wife makes loans to offer
empanadas and arroz con coco to the fictions turning flesh, hunger.
Rodrigo squirms in my grasp, the descendent of the dry minutes

which quiet turns into decades, still needing to be held, cleaned,
reformed. The body now manifest at this one time,
with this name, in my stained
arms.

Mr. Rogers kills fruit flies

This is not the set with the trolley.
This is not Brockett’s Bakery
or Trow’s Workshop or Negri’s Music.

These flies malinger in my kitchen
squatting on my mangoes and my pears.
I should have thrown out those bananas

when they leathered, but I always believed
that everything has a use, even if overripe.
And all beings should have a right to live

in their essence, unobtrusively.
But these fruit flies are unclean:
they rust the wheels, they push kids

in line and extort quarters, they falsify
their usefulness for consuming decay.
I cannot discuss them away with delicacy,

especially as I speak into the glass lens.
I spin a paper into a funnel:
wide as sky at the top, narrow as necessity

near the bottom. I pour pinot noir
into the jar, set the thin trumpet in to fit
tight at the rim. Once the creatures

venture to the sweet smell
they will be captured, scrambling
on the glass looking out at more

ripe tangerines I have set in the bowl.
I think I hear them arguing. They are still alive.
It’s such a good feeling. I say this every day

from the other side. I am late for the studio.
At least the Earl Grey warms me.
I leave as small regrets swim

and ferment.

Hydatoscopy: by rainwater

Mist: not enough to gamble on, keep the eucalyptus
hips hidden in a murmur of curses, don’t open
your lips to even breathe

Drizzle: the words lengthen, laryngospasm, mild
dyspnea as the mucilage dots the tongue
it may be possible to capture a fly

Sprinkle: this is more like crying, if antifreeze
on the street shines sweetly, then drive erratically
around churches

Rain: digestive phrases leak heavy onto coffee cups
from the rust playing on balconies, h. pylori
ulcerates eventually

Cats: rafters give way and iguanas dig talons
into my mastoid as they dance down

Dogs: destroy slender tomato starts which poke
out of the groin like inaccurate depictions of joy

Tropical: swim along, leach, attach to ankles,
try to remember when the wounds weren’t there

Deluge: it was the end of the last ice age not rain
your Neanderthal auntie skinny dipped in the fjords
of Languedoc