Chiroptera: Seven Ages of Juliane Koepcke
by Rico Craig
& Juliane is reborn through clouds, with a polished coin
under her tongue, no wings. Lightning scrawls history
on the sky; bats cradle her falling, each scream swaddled
in leathery wings. Metal, fire and loved bodies cascade;
her brief infancy is sonar — screeches and rushing air.
& Juliane opens her eyes; the earth reaching for her, arms green
and clothed in leaves, vines twisting and snaking, branches running
through her hair. There is a bone outside her skin, she has been born
from the deepest sleep. Her lips bite together, fish move in the river
confessing water. She learns to walk, lets the mud hold her ankles.
& Juliane moves along the river with a branch in her hand, pushing
from the banks. There are creatures squirming in the red
under her skin. She has doused them in fluid from a metal can.
People are lusting from the shoreline, waiting for her to breathe
so they can write words in newspapers and fill screens with light.
& Juliane escapes to the lawns gripping university buildings; twenty years,
and all the pages she types are bound with fig and fructose.
People cannot hold a conversation with awe; she cannot love people
who drape her body in gowns. She longs for a cloud roiling
with bats, their yawning wings, their faith in science.
& Juliane is a tiny body cradled in the membrane of decades. The bats gnaw
at nocturnes. She stalks caves, listening for the echo of flight, painting
yellow words on wings as they sleep. The bones in her arms are thin
as starlight, longing to be marrowed. Each evening a thousand bats
swirl from the cave-mouth and never worry a hair on her body.
& Juliane flutters eyelashes and people see immortality, a wild man
pretends to wear her skin. He looks at the sky for raining metal
and fills her pockets with chess pieces, promising they represent
something — the way they persist. She sifts through
bat waste, gathering seeds, looking for scratches made by tiny teeth.
& rainforest trees remember the sound of her breaking bones,
under the canopy there are mounds that could be maternal, flesh taken
by leaves. The forest is always hungry and the river is tireless.
She returns the coin to the place under her tongue and lowers
herself into the river-mud, waiting for her mother to fall from the sky.
Rico Craig is a teacher, writer, and award-winning poet whose work melds the narrative, lyrical and cinematic. Craig is published widely; his poetry collection BONE INK (University of Western Australia Publishing) was winner of the 2017 Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize 2018. His next collection, Our Tongues Are Songs, will be published in 2021. https://ricocraig.com/