Our Fireflies

by Ronnie Sirmans

Even enlightened populaces used leeches

for medicinal purposes for centuries,

to siphon away bad blood, but of course

good blood must be lost in the process.

And before remedy must come diagnosis,

and so I learned how to use our fireflies.

My murder of kinfolk (we didn’t call

ourselves a family, but our nomenclature

was the same as assembled crows, dark)

kept fireflies in jars for detecting ailments.

Use a wooden-handle ice pick to poke

three points of a triangle into the lid:

a hole for gratitude, a hole for wisdom,

and a hole to share the air for the living. 

Generations ago we’d learned to feed

them peach nectar to keep them alive

out of season and to shine as brightly as

wild ones who only light up warm skies.

Place a firefly on the tip of the tongue

of the stricken; my grandma said they

will move about at first as if uncertain,

as if brushstrokes of a foreign language.

They then take flight, alight upon the site

to denote where a diagnosis can be made.

Gunged-up bowels. Stopped-up lung.

Clogged heart. Blocked vein in the leg. 

The gossamer legs, antennae, abdomen

tickling bare skin where illness lurked. 

Ailments easily limned by our fireflies.

When I was a young teen, I tried it for fun 

with my best friend even though he said 

there was nothing really wrong with him.

The firefly left his tongue, circled his skull,

landed on his right eye like a malformed pupil. 

The quick pinprick of lightning blinded him, 

and both of us held our breaths, maybe hands.