Lauren Quin: Bat's Belly

Chaotic biological forms From Sasha Chapin's text: Lauren is trying to tell you something. It’s beneath her fingers as she’s scraping through the hot blue and the noisy shimmer, after she’s made them hang together. They are the ladder she’s climbing towards the only thing that really matters. It’s not a phrase you can say precisely. You can only touch it slightly, like a wing raking water. It’s a message that’s been with her since she was 7, long of limb and shivering in the pool in Georgia, when a bat skimmed the water before her. How did the water taste to that leather creature? That taste is what she’s after, the plushy nausea surrounding awareness, the nightly antechamber before the void clicks on, when you’re so close to sleep that you’re scarcely realer than a dollar or a patch of careworn cellophane.