BELLA ROTKER
Slow Motion
Radio static and blood crowd
between my teeth. Here is where the story
is fuzzy. My father is driving and saying the only
way is to pretend it never existed. I keep
having this nightmare where the apartment
in Caracas blows up. The glass I used to
press my snotty nose up against
shatters and melts. The whale-shaped baby pool
is on the terrace when the building
collapses. The water in it floating
upward where it fell. In the dream, Abuela’s
apartment is across the street and I’m sitting
by the glass walls with a dead
rose stuck in my toddler-sized
mouth. Rotten petals fall around me. Abuelo
is alive and he’s singing sana
sana. When I tell my father I published
a poem about it, he’ll suddenly brake on the highway
and a rabbit will die
in the dark. I’ll scream and hold
my breath the rest of the way home. He’ll say stop
putting us in your poems. Blood
will be dripping down my chin
by the time we get home. I will slam
the door and it’ll shatter and my mother
will say what the hell happened? I won’t
answer and instead I’ll start coughing
and the marble in the foyer will turn red
with blood and spit. This isn’t the part
where the rabbit dies but I can’t stop thinking
about it. I’m standing there, bleeding out
by the front door, glass shards stuck
in my heels. Here, the rabbit keeps dying in front
of me. Here, I spend the rest of my life
in the foyer even after my mother sells the house.
I stand there and bleed and the bunny’s body stays on the highway.
Bella Rotker is a sophomore at the Interlochen Arts Academy where she majors in creative writing. She was born in Caracas, Venezuela and grew up in Miami, FL. She has received recognition from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and was a finalist in the Charles Crupi Memorial Poetry Contest. She won the Haley Naughton Memorial Scholarship to Iowa Young Writers Studio, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Red Wheelbarrow, The Hyacinth Review, and Crashtest. Bella can usually be found trying (and failing) to pet bunnies, pressing flowers, or staring wistfully at bodies of water.