Dear Bat Boy,
I’ve followed your career for some time
now, mainly in the grocery store,
after being shooed away by couples
from the wine and cheese aisle—
or while waiting in line with the kind of parents
who’d let their rotten taters totter up
and laugh in your face as you screamed, because
you cling to a visceral world
that refuses to understand you!
Or, so I’ve read, in the Weekly World News. Oh,
they only focused on your faults—
“Bat Boy! Drunk on Party Boat—”
“Bat Boy Bites Santa Claus—”
They mistook your passion
for aggression then romanticized
it later —“Bat Boy Searches for Love—”
tried softening you up, but you’re no donut,
you're half-bat, half-boy
who, according to scientists,
has a confused sense of morality—
as is mine,
according to my ex, who said, It’s not that I don't like
you, I just don’t like what you do.
Like, I’m trouble? I said. Yeah,
he said, like that . . . Squares, Bat Boy, have angles
I’ll never understand,
but a bat has a heart
the size of its body, so I can see why
you went off the grid and live in tunnels now.
I imagine the reason some of us go
underground is to gain access to that dark piece
of something everyone else
has overlooked, and once they find
a way inside they leave nothing
but footprints behind. I can see that
on cold nights
when the sky gets misty-eyed,
lit windows warm outlines—
and there is so much love outside
my brick apartment, it’s almost too much
to take—I can feel the breathing
of the half-opened mouth
alarm bell, a train glides by—
all I can see are bones I can’t
hold hard enough—
because I’m all nerves.
My heart is a pipe bomb
in anyone’s hands.
Meanwhile in Florence
I read someone stole a frieze from Santa Croce
over the weekend. And given my sense of Florence
or elsewhere is less than impressive, I thought maybe
you and the thief may have passed on the street.
And I thought about how much sacredness is out there—
citadels dry as thyme, incense and moss, other worlds
woven out of chaos, galaxies of saints, sinners missing
fingers, gobs of pierced hearts—and how I wish
I were a bit more delicate, more informed. I wonder
what’s in you, the places you walk through, and if I stand
in the archway of your thoughts, how is it I come to you?
Is it between respite and revision, or between lovely hallowed
things, pink slopes of unfinished marble, or the flexed muscles
of straight-hearted statues? They’re so quiet, so indifferent,
they’re almost a secret, where all it takes is a slap
of rain to wash me away.
Rachel Inez Marshall is a Nashville-based writer. She holds an MFA from Florida State University and her work has appeared in LA Review, Rattle, Nimrod, Mississippi Review, and Washington Square.
Slider photo: Random Tandem via Foter.com / CC BY
Page photo: leighannemcc via Foter.com / CC BY-SA