Maryfrances Wagner | Myotis Lucifugus | Poets Resist

Maryfrances Wagner’s latest books are a memoir in poems, The Immigrants’ New Camera, and The Silence of Red Glass. She won the Thorpe Menn Book Award for her book Red Silk, she is the co-editor of I-70 Review, and she chairs the programming committee of The Writers Place.

Maryfrances Wagner’s Website.

Also by Maryfrances Wagner: The Silence of Red Glass Dioramas Salvatore’s Daughter

Poets Resist
Edited by Jemshed Khan
May 24, 2019

Maryfrances Wagner

Myotis Lucifugus

Brown cave bats [are] critical pollinators … They eat thousands of insects in a single night, and their pest-control value to the economy is estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. — Defenders of the Wilderness During the Wednesday blizzard, you posted a photo of an ice-covered bat hanging from your screen door. You didn’t rescue it, glad to see it fly off into sleet, as though it might recover, as though bats might be infinite. On summer nights tunnels of wings pour into the sky. A ledge shadow opens, a stir near a face, a dark leaf passing. Brains small as beans, bats hear beetles crawl, moths fly. With a wing, they shawl themselves or cradle their one pup they can locate among the squawking thousands. In their hibernaculum, they toe hang, closed umbrellas, quiet as glistening nuns, unless a gunshot deafens or a light beam frightens them to drop their pup to the cave floor where hungry coachwhips scuttle over bones.