Michelle Bitting
Maybe Red Devils Run from my Heart
~ after Stephen Crane
The Pope held the hand of a child with Down Syndrome,
continuing his grand but humble mass at the Vatican altar
undisturbed after she burst through the crowd to be near him.
A barrier of police broken. On his deathbed: Just bury me in a yard
said the Pope—a simple plaque, my winnowed name. Well, bravo,
I thought, sick to death of the legacy parade that really means
people aren’t okay with the mortal coil coming. I think of my mother
in a fitted dress of embroidered Chinese satin, at the stove in the old
mid-century A-frame, her hand delicate around the spoon, stirring
a pale pot of thickening béchamel. Her face perfectly made up—
movie star material she was, but the only acting she did
was to make everyone think inside she was deeply happy. Now
she is old and calls me late at night slurring her grievances—
who is the child now? I’m nowhere near as nice as that Pope
and I lack heart to do more than long ago I learned—break lines and bolt
for what I need, a holiness to hold me still to this red and wicked life.
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Image by Maycon Marmo
Michelle Bitting is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Heavy Feather Review, National Poetry Review, Catamaran, ONE ART, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.
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