Even Evan, who wore a beret and a black polo neck like we were hanging out in a 1950s New York basement. Evan, whose poetry was written by bats.
I asked him once if he’d prefer to read up-side-down, ‘it might feel more authentic.’ He looked at me as though I should find myself exhausting, like quitting hosting poetry nights to focus on my actual job was the best option for me. ‘Bats process more sensory data than we ever could,’ he said.
The first bat poem Evan read was about grief. In it, devastation bounced off every surface creating echoey images of impenetrable cave walls. The audience, mostly poets clutching the pieces they planned to read, was moved to tears.
As far as I’m aware, bats don’t find themselves wishing they could talk to their not-long-dead father about their troubled marriage. They don’t drop from the sky because the thought ‘I must give dad a call’ popped into their head, because for a moment they forgot he won’t be there to answer. But Evan said, ‘If we want to understand our lack of understanding, we have to embrace non-human creativity.’
Evan started sharing his access to bats with other people, had Spoken Word Nights changed to Chiroptera Slams. He swapped bar snacks for swarms of midges and introduced segregated seating, because female bats tend to keep themselves separate unless they’re ready to mate.
I couldn’t stomach the readings. I went outside, sat and watched insects bother street lights, wrote about a community who survived on a diet of nothing but moths. They had all the protein they needed, but fur from the moth’s bodies built up on their tongues, until it was impossible for them to get their words out.
Anika Carpenter lives and works in Brighton, UK. Her stories have been published by Fictive Dream, Gone Lawn, Goosebury Pie, 100 Word Story and others, and have been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and the Bath Flash Fiction Award. You can find her via her website www.anikacarpenter.com
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