Catherine DeNunzio

At the Dairy Queen, 1972

It happened as we sat with melting cones
in the shade of an aging oak, talking about
the boys we had been meeting after dark.

Not far away, a woman shrieked,
waving her arms wildly at something
black hovering, then diving at her head.

Over and over, it hovered and dove.
We watched from a distance: You worked
that summer counting shore bird eggs

along the Hammonasset marshes; I was
a counselor at the local nature camp. We knew
this with certainty: Her attacker was a bat.

Your hair is white now, mine gray. Back then,
we had not yet known predacious men
or the anguish of losing loved ones,

nor had we foreseen failed pregnancies,
malignant cells, a deadly virus circling the earth.
At sixteen, we could see but could not

know that woman’s terror, how
powerless she was over something
so intentional, scythe-like, relentless.

Catherine DeNunzio’s poems have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from The Robert Frost Place, Connecticut Literary Anthology, Connecticut River Review, Delmarva Review, Italian Americana, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Scapegoat Review, and Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis. DeNunzio is the author of Enough Like Bone to Build On (Antrim House, 2022). She lives in Connecticut, where she loves eating vanilla, coconut, or mocha chunk ice cream.