Two Poems by Caleb Parkin

Soprano Pipistrelle and Magenta Precision Perform

their auditorium always the night

Magenta is wired through with mics
her black frock a sleek box
embroidered with switches and dials

Soprano wears her ostentatious skin
draped from her limbs’ manicured hooks
her face contorts like an autumn leaf
twisting on its branch as she sings
out across the spots of streetlights
where mothy choruses gather swirl
flutter and fizz they are powdered
with delight worshipping under
sodium moons some even have hemi-
spheric retroreflectors adorning their
fibrous extremities and thus

Soprano not only sings but conjures a sonic
mise-en-scène voice reaching longing
to taste the textures of their echoes

Magenta enraptured listens twists
at her apparatus to tweak their waves
for (we) her audience (us) off-stage
out there in the turbulent brouhaha
of human night
Soprano crescendos
ascends beyond flight her membranous
gown drawn wide her song urgent
busting with hunger

Magenta urges Yes darling higher
Yes darling louder

the moth-chorus scatters under
electric confusion disperses in bursts
of frenetic g l i t t e r
Soprano sweeps on through
tonight’s cues solo to solo aria to
mothy area coughs through each tiny moth-
eaten pool of light

(A Soprano Pipistrelle is a species of bat and Magenta Precision, a type of bat detector.)

My Summer as a Long-Tailed Tit

one day   i will be so light   they’ll barely notice
me vault garden gates   stolen mud-smudged tufts

stuck to my flanks   i am an understudy
practising my lines every dawn   why must avian

always conjure the feminine   can i not chirrup
bundle fluffily   scatter into branch-tangle

let me hurtle barefooted   always looking up  
let me fall   graze myself   all over until one day

my legs will spindle   pipe-cleanery   my head
a cottonwool ball with mascara dabs   today

i sat on a bin with them c o n f e t t i e d around me
for an instant   let me be adored through patio doors

as i spider-silk-lichen my spherical nest   each buttock
goosebumped   prickling with a tailfeather ache

Caleb Parkin has poems in The Guardian, The Rialto, The Poetry Review and was guest poet on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please. His debut collection, This Fruiting Body, is published by Nine Arches Press and was longlisted for the Laurel Prize 2022. He’s published three pamphlets: Wasted Rainbow with tall-lighthouse; All the Cancelled Parties, his collected City Poet commissions; and most recently, The Coin, from Broken Sleep Books. He tutors for Poetry Society, Poetry School, Cheltenham Festivals, First Story, Arvon, and holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes (CWTP). From 2023, he’s a practice-as-research PhD candidate at University of Exeter, as part of RENEW Biodiversity.