Bella Rotker

Dinner Table II

Reason with godliness in an empty sea,

a means of survival. I can’t split the 

speaker from the self, but I can reckon 

with being animal. There is only

the visceral left. There is hurt here, fire-

flies burrowing into the dark of night. 

I am not afraid of how blue night gets, 

or bugs crawling into nowhere.

The fish who don’t ask to go back to a

country at war. There is fear coming in 

through our cracks. I am not a product 

of change but of fleeing. My father is

passing around glasses of rum and coke:

all we have is our fear. It’s all that’s left.