“Little Brown Bat” by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10)

An excerpt from “Little Brown Bat” by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10), published at American Literary Review:

 

Little Brown Bat

​1.

That you must fall to fly. That you can live two decades or more.
That you have young like we do, one per year.

That you make a rich milk to feed your pup and to keep it warm
fold it between your wings.

That you eat every day half your weight in mosquitoes, found
by echolocation one winged speck at a time.

That you hibernate in utter torpor, absorbing the fat you’ve stored,
a very precise amount.

That you were, on that July night, a shy, soft thing, a vibration
just brushing my left eyebrow.

That you once were once unnumbered as Dante’s leaves in the fall.
​That you die from eating the insects

we poison. That you are cut down by wind turbines, not the blades
but the drop in air pressure popping you

like kernels of corn. That you swoop and careen arcs traced
by the streetlights of my childhood summers.

[…continue reading here]