BELLA ROTKER
What damage
this does, running the wine-dark water over
and over my fingers until they bleed
and the film leaks ink into the river.
We were silhouettes suspended
in film. I can’t stop tracing our shapes
into the clouds. (There was a version
of this with clouds.) We can’t pull this far
enough back to leave any of it
at the museum, where we took polaroids in front
of the staircase. I’m not sorry
for the bones, the birds. The robin we’d
dismantled. Or hid. Orange dissolving
into the corners, the piano, the walks
downhill. What does it mean to protect—
or preserve. I’m not sorry because we’ll never
make it into an archive but I know
this. Listen: there were bugs, ivy,
mineral shaped into memory. We ate
leaves below the sculptures and couldn’t
help but know there’s nothing we can do
about time leaving us at its fraying
edges. About the river as it darkens. Look,
everything has its brokenness. Plates
collide. Skeletons dismantle. The fractures
work their way up the lenses and every photo
etches a line between us. There were always photos, and I’m not
sorry for the ink dissolving, or for the rain,
the oxbow bend— we were surrounded
by the weight of the water. I swear
this was only ever all-consuming. A self
portrait. No. Preservation.
Sonnet for the time we read Kafka and tried to -esque him
Our body, chiseled in thin air. Sorry,
we materialize into nothing.
Our bodies are fading into darkness.
We’re bug-like. We— no, you redistribute
into fog. Slowly, you collect, reshape
into something abstract. I can’t decide
what about this feels so intangible
other than distance, parallax movement,
form. Reform. We’re not sitting, legs shrinking
into an animal’s. Or— an insect’s.
Simples arranged thing–wise or as symbols.
We’re wiping it blank. No. We’re wiping blanks.
You’re not here, but lost. Something that’s more like
disappearing, or evolving into you.
Bella Rotker (they/she) is a sophomore at Interlochen Arts Academy where they study creative writing. She was born in Venezuela and grew up in Miami. She won the Haley Naughton Memorial Scholarship to Iowa Young Writers Studio and their work has appeared in The Hyacinth Review, Full Mood Mag, and Spoonie Press, among others. Bella can usually be found trying (and failing) to pet bunnies, pressing flowers, or staring wistfully at bodies of water.