BELLA ROTKER
On the Subject of Constellations and Fish
After Emily Pittinos
The Pearl
Bottle caps and energy drinks, she was an oyster split in the red tide. Edibles and pink hair dye were not things a pearl was supposed to have found on its thirteenth birthday, but they came wrapped in torn Publix bags and CVS receipts.
The Dock at Loggerhead Marina, 2009
Fish skeletons in piles on the beach. A girl crouched behind them, smoking pot. She didn’t look any older than fifteen.
Old Cutler Road
She stood on the side of the road with her middle school boyfriend.
Do you miss me, he’d asked.
She had burned her diary two, or maybe it was three, years ago. The stoplight above them shone green in her red eyes and she’d walked off.
Try again next time, she’d called over her shoulder.
South Beach Pride, 2010
A flag stapled around her neck with the stapler stolen from her theology teacher’s room. Her hand in another, in the air. The drag queen who told us to buy waterproof mascara.
The Waterfall Glows at Midnight
Wet curls plastered to a blue polka dot bikini. The rushing water.
Let me take a picture of you in the moonlight. Why don’t you dance in the rain with me? We only get one rom-com per lifetime.
She told me she believed in reincarnation. That every good thing brought you closer to whatever afterlife was out there. She believed in Adele and Pablo Neruda. That music and poetry could save her. She believed her mother was wrong about god. She believed god knew that good was subjective.
Cafe in Doral
Her mother made her speak with her abuela biweekly over cafe cubano and pastelitos. In February of her Junior year, her tears salted her breakfast. Her converse stained green from the fake grass on the cafe floor.
Necesitas a Jesus, mi amor. Pray more.
These are the days she insisted matrilineal relationships were not legally binding.
Adrift at Night
She learned to sail on a Catfish in Bimini. The last July I loved her, she took me there and connected the constellations. Drew them from memory down my collarbone. The north star. The Lion. Andromeda. She played Hometown Glory from her dad’s iPod, and pretended it was middle school again.
I like it in the city, when two worlds collide.
Orion, she whispered beneath Adele and god, that’s the one my parents named me after.
Tattoo Parlor on 6th Street, 2014
When she graduated, she got a tattoo with a line from her favorite poem. She drew down her arm the way the world collapses, a memory of us holding hands, a sailboat over the waves, the silhouette of a Monster can tab.
Confessional
Bless me father, for I have sinned. It’s been a week since my last confession.
She whispered through the screen behind the altar.
I’m working up to telling my mother I’m gay.
When the World Decides To End
She wanted to sit adrift with some ecstasy and meet Santa Maria on a rowboat. She wanted to make paper airplanes and throw them into Shark Valley. She wanted to leave this town before the world got the chance to cave in.
Cathedral
When she was younger, her mother took her to church on Sundays and after school every day. She learned to avoid coming home in time for her mother to drag her there. She joined debate club. Robotics. Book club. She went to my house.
Jesus misses you, her mother would say when she got home.
Jesus is indifferent, she’d respond.
Marine Biology
I want to study the way fish arrange themselves in coral reefs, the way that shells become sand, the way you look in the moonlight on the beach.
Chalk Silhouette on Main St.
I learned the way bullets pass through bones like butter the day she took me downtown. She was in her blue ruched dress, the one she once said she’d like to get engaged in. Bullets don’t know they’re killing someone’s daughter. The coroner found an engagement ring in her purse, handed it to me in a biohazard bag.
The Legalities of It
I want a courthouse wedding, your name on my taxes, a penthouse in South Beach, I want you there.
Speaking of which
Jesus doesn’t care about gay sex but he did tell his disciple to put down his weapon. Matthew 26:52.
Tu si eres una malcriada, her mother responded. Where did I go wrong with you?
News Reports
I saw her name in pastel infographics.
Gun Violence Has Reached A Peak In the US, they said.
Queer Girl Fatally Attacked by Own Mother.
They didn’t say she will never finish her degree. They didn’t say god is killing our daughters.
I unsubscribed from the Miami Herald, the Sun Sentinel, the Miami Hurricane.
Dream Sequence
I kept seeing her slack face at night. Wondered if heaven was real and if she made it there. The therapist said the nightmares will take some time to go away. That I had to make it through all five stages of grief.
Funeral Procession
The funeral was a closed casket. She told me once that there’s no dignity in a dead body on display. She asked in the ambulance to have a poem read instead of a eulogy. I picked Neruda. I picked Open Sea.
Home in The Gables
Despite what the therapist recommended, I never left Miami.
Young love will break you, she’d said.
I’m scared I’ll never be whole again. This is the way of a leaking raft on the sea. Of the flag I left at half mast for three months. This is the way of people moving on and of staying there on Main Street where a bullet passed through her ribcage.
Widows Are No Fun
Her socks strewn through the house, her watch, a fountain pen. A line from a poetry book that says longing is the undertow. Here is the riptide. Here’s where we shatter. Here is where I remember that she doesn’t exist anywhere but fading polaroids and letters on napkins. Here is the divide between Catholicism and a twenty-something realizing her dead girlfriend’s god is a motherfucker.
Miami Dade Police Station, 2022
“Hate crime” is a strong accusation. Are you sure that’s what happened? … We can add the charge but I wouldn’t recommend it. … It just seems unlikely a mother would do that to her child. … That kind of thing is hard to prove. … How did you know her? You mean, like, romantically? … I see. … No, there’s nothing more we can do.
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.