Elizabeth Kuelbs


Walking with My Son at Dusk I Worry About Putin's Nuclear Threats and the Skin-Eating Fungus That's Killing Bats


Tiny canyon bats flutter against the coral sky, hunting mosquitos.
I want my son to see them. I tell him how, after Pearl Harbor,
the sunset rush of free-tailed bats from the mouth of Carlsbad Caverns
sparked a dentist’s vision:

Harness their speed, altitude, multitudes and love for cozy nooks,
Dr. Adams proposed, strap firebombs to their breasts, and bingo,
the perfect flame swarm to burn the enemy’s

(now ally’s)

paper homes. Convinced the dentist

(past inventor of an airmail system, future inventor
of a fried chicken vending machine)

was not a nut, FDR launched secret efforts to arm free-tailed bats
with napalm capsules and time-delay fuses, refrigerate them for packing
into bomb cases made in Bing Crosby’s factory, and airdrop them over
enemy cities.

One accidentally-ashed US airfield later, furry bomblets torched
a replica of a Japanese village

(What were we doing? wondered young Sgt. Jack Couffer).

Poised to order 1,000,000 units, the Navy canceled. The atomic bomb
was almost ready.

So whack, my son says, looking up at the bats

(dollared now for annual insect-eating, inventors now fighting
p. destructans, little brown bats still on the planet, mangoes
still in the bowl, tequila still on the shelf).

I worked in a bomb factory, I say, before you were born. Did you know
bat moms give birth upside down

(everywhere flowers, everywhere fires, and this hunger—
for untearable wings, here in the scarlet light,
where we can do—anything—



Note: FDR and Couffer quotes from Bat Bomb: World War II’s Other Secret Weapon by Jack Couffer.

Elizabeth Kuelbs writes at the edge of a Los Angeles canyon. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Scientific American, Lily Poetry Review, Rust & Moth, Claw & Blossom, Poets Reading the News, The Ekphrastic Review, and other publications. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her chapbooks include How to Clean Your Eyes and Little Victory, a 2022 Independent Press Awards distinguished favorite in Social/Political Poetry. Visit her online.

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