A bat flickers by, marking dusk’s
rise of mosquitoes. A jet drags
its double trail through a pale sky,
then it fades away, leaving one
pinpoint star out over the long
leaf pines. Eerily quiet night
before the 4th day of July.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe,
Sherwood Anderson and others
watched these trees turn from green to black.
Fitzgerald had hit his midlife
slump and would never recover.
In a year or so, Zelda would
be confined in Asheville. It was
1935; everyone
was depressed. F. Scott and Paul Boyd
distracted themselves with gossip
of Elva Statler Davidson’s
mysterious death in Pinehurst.
Fortunate servants looked on.
In Germany, Hitler founded
the Luftwaffe. Der Führer was
two years into his dictatorship.
Donner and blitzen soon would pump
fear into the minds of children.
In the U.S., we’d develop
the bat bomb, a canister full
of Chiroptera armed with small
incendiary devices
clipped to their vampiric bodies.
In New Mexico, during trials,
bats were accidentally released and
torched the testing range to the ground.
They were supposed to pay back Japan
for Pearl Harbor, but I digress.
More bats have assembled, echo-
locating and zeroing in.
Southern Pines, July 2019
JOHN HOPPENTHALER’s books of poetry are Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area, Domestic Garden, Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, and Lives of Water, all with Carnegie Mellon UP. With Kazim, Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company (U of Michigan P). Professor of CW and Literature at East Carolina University, he serves on the Advisory Board for Backbone Press, specializing in the publication and promotion of marginalized voices. His poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Magazine, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, The Literary Review, Blackbird, Southern Humanities Review, and many other journals, anthologies, and textbooks.