A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

Bat Bridge

Anurak Saelaow, Singapore-New York

 

… at once apparent, the bats—obscure as periods—

were penciled in and tunneling over the Colorado,

yawing overhead, gilding lines of force or structure

 

across the evening’s weight. Tensile sprays of tinsel

warped about a terrible brow of sky. I see it now.

Exhale between steel boughs, spitting up some

 

winged utterance that asserts itself in half-light, 

sputum or hairball of desire given form

and sent screeching into night. What is a throat

 

if not an arch? I am a girder, bent, churning out

this furred and brooding cache. Fervor’s eruptions

probe or cast themselves against horizon,

 

multiplied against muddy water. I see this 

and want to know that I am still emptying,

that the body’s arc still defies relief.

 

Anurak Saelaow has been published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Hayden's Ferry Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Cultural Weekly, The Kindling, Ceriph, and elsewhere. He is the author of one chapbook, Schema (The Operating System, 2015), and holds a BA in Creative Writing and English from Columbia University.

Summit County, UT

Citizen Sky