Pre-Op Portrait with a Colony of Bats

Vandal Poem of the Day: March 23, 2018

by Susannah Nevison
They held the mask
over your mouth, pumped you
full of forgetting: the sky
fashioned a noose and hanged
herself, purpling and gasping—
slackening, she let loose
her dusky children, shook them
from their clustered lung of sleep,
spit them like broken teeth—their bodies
swarmed your eyes, wings thin as any
eyelid—and you—you got it wrong—
the owls never came—
from TeratologyFind it in the Library
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Published in Poems Susannah Nevison

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