Bat Dip

Sarah Westcott

after CAConrad

1. Make a list of words that come to mind when you think of bats—two lines as long or short as they need to be. It may take you forever.

2. Chop them into pieces then re-assemble fragments randomly while listening online to bat sonograms. Feel for any bat-ness ticking through your arms.

3. Blow, scatter paper like confetti. You are marrying yourself to a furred bat-belly! Feel skinned and light-boned.

4. Resist the urge to take a photograph on your phone of these figments. Resist the urge to hoard—to do so is to make a bat fall like a stone from the sky.

5. Put the word fragments in your pocket or down your bra. Go outside at dusk, if you can, and bring a pencil and paper. When (if) the first bat is sensed, trace its line of flight over the page with your eyes shut, a definitive mark note. Imagine bats if there are none.

6. Each time you sense a bat, pull out a word from your pocket and place it on the line at an angle. If you sense the bat senses you, do whatever it suggests. If the wind blows the words let them go.

7. Continue until you notice your own body becoming hungry and the words running out.

8. Pinch the webbed space between your finger and thumb, flex your metacarpals. Imagine the mineral taste of chitin. Ask yourself: can bats smell?

9. Stroke across the dip of your philtrum, its rise and fall. Build a dream-poem through the skin. When you fall asleep, wrap yourself in wings, let them cover your whole body.

SARAH WESTCOTT has published two collections with Pavilion Poetry (Liverpool University Press) - Slant Light, and Bloom, which was shortlisted for the Ledbury Hellens Prize for best second collections in 2023. Her second pamphlet, Pond, a hybrid piece, was published in 2024. She is researching a PhD on the poem as a multi-species event.