Fly

[Lizzie]

Hi Caleb. Whether or not to swat a fly makes me think of all the existential questions, so I find the subject worthy.

Fly


Poor fly – very small, a fruit fly –
floated 'round my bathroom five days if not a week. -- maybe 'you floated' at the beginning to set the speaker's voice right off the bat. Encountering the 'you' in the next sentence made me do a double take.
So small that I could not hear you buzz.  -- this doesn't read as a complete sentence because of 'that.' Looks like a fragment. Maybe, 'you were so small' or just 'I could not hear you buzz' since you've noted the size of the fly already.
I swatted at you every instant that I spied you,
but you nimbly made your escapes.

You fed on the scum on the sink bowl. -- maybe 'in the sink bowl' to avoid having two on's
I washed the sink to stop you, to starve you.
Such a little fly, but well worth the obsession. -- I like how you're setting the plot as a kind of epic battle, requiring strategy, focus, persistence 

Then came that morning when you did not move,
that morning when I got you, then flicked you down the drain -- like the ambivalent feelings about winning against a worthy foe
with a tidal wave of water to make sure the threat was gone;
but suddenly I did not feel safe at all.

The winter had arrived, and you were trapped inside.
Perhaps you flew in before the cold came, or came to life
in my garbage bin, rising like a phoenix from the rotting meat. -- phoenix is good imagery to me

Had I pulled the window up, the cold might have killed you,
stopped you from being my only companion for a week,
but I did not want to pee in the cold. -- I like the contrast between the epic imagery of the last stanza and now talking about the temperature of the toilet

Perhaps when I got you, you were already dead,
dead from natural causes, sitting at the wing of God
in fly heaven.  I hope so. -- 'fly heaven' demeans the fly a little too much for me. I've come to see him/her as noble and regal in a way from the phoenix imagery. Fly heaven feels a little childlike for a poem on such adult themes.

Dead from starvation?  I hope not.
I feel ashamed. -- I don't mind this direct statement terribly, but I do think it can be inferred easily from the narrative you've provided. I think being too specific about the speaker's emotional state unnecessarily limits the range we can read in to the speaker's emotions.

Poor fly.  Doomed by everything.  By me.
By time.  By choices.  By life which always dies. -- this last stanza is where it falls apart for me, because I think you're trying to draw all the conclusions for the reader and not trusting that they'll get there themselves. I like the re-iteration of 'poor fly' to mirror the first sentence, but I think less will be more at the end here.
By God too.  Oh, I am also a fly! -- I wouldn't state so explicitly the link between the speaker and the fly -- it is obvious throughout the poem that the fly is all of us.

What about (for the ending), something along the lines of:

Poor fly.

Small fly.

Doomed fly.

Thanks for sharing!

Hope this is helpful in some way.

Lizzie