Melissa Crowe
This month I've been sad enough to watch
about a hundred hours of home renovation on TV,
just to see something clean and neat nailed over
something ugly. But in one episode the demo man
huffed hot cat box smell from an uncovered fireplace
then climbed to the attic and startled cluster
after cluster of bats with his flashlight beam.
Reader, he hated them, flexing their gray velvet
wings, unfurling in the sudden glare like lovers
scared apart or babies woken from a nap.
He meant to call an exterminator, but I
consoled myself with what I knew—they're protected,
have to be rehomed. At forty-five I sometimes feel
a way—desperate and achy—that makes me
think or sometimes say I want my mother.
There were six hundred bats in that attic,
and if I'm honest I don't trust the folks
who sucked them into cages, don't know
if they're scattered like scraps or curled together
in a complex of clean pine boxes, waiting for a dusk
they'll navigate by song, fill their bellies then slip back
to the silk of bodies strange to me, yes, and terrifying
to the demo man. I've so often felt myself
scrapped, that whoever's job I was
left the job undone, but when I remember love, my mother
loving me, one thing that comes to mind is a night
when my ear ached like an awl pounded in,
like bone cracking so near the brain to think
was pain, and we didn't own a heating pad, didn't own
so many things, so she warmed a dry washcloth
on top of the toaster and held it to my ear
while I cried, and each time the cloth cooled
she went to the kitchen to heat it. Those moments
without her and the compress—which didn't make
the pain go away, I don't even know
if its piercing diminished—may have been
my first bereft moments, but Reader, she kept
coming back to hold that comfort to my throbbing
and my fear, so a rhythm kicked up that night
and lasted maybe forever, me alone and then
rehomed, sorrow in both states, yes,
and the strangeness of my body, made to suffer,
and the bodies that give me succor, how we furl and unfurl.