A fruit fly fell in my fine crystal glass
half full of five-dollar wine.

Annoyed, I almost flung the final sips
behind a rosebush. But I remembered Bogotá,

where four men fished me, facedown,
from a tide pool of tequila,

delivered my body, unruined, to soft hotel sheets,
and left two white aspirin by the bed.

Fly, maybe grace is everything
that could fuck you but doesn’t.

Like my middle finger, just long enough
to scoop six wretched legs from the deadly red

and set them stumbling toward dusk,
the shadowed promise of coming light —

                          another unearned chance at life.