//creative//
Spring 2017
This May Be It
Rosalie Wetzel
Beginning, as one must,
I will with an admission:
Everything is chemical.
There is a space
around which smoke curls
and clouds gather
and it has become the material
upon which I have nursed
a timid array of suspicions.
Believing myself
to be deserving of more
than these tediously pocketed
intimations,
I have wandered into certain hours
and relinquished a few things.
The first prayer I ever said
was a plea, or a bargain, if you will.
And the last will be an order:
Behold, my permanence.
It is an exercise in self-actualization
to repeat: I am intact.
But this is also little more than self-flattery.
And so begins my address:
Everything is chemical
and heaving
and terribly precise.
Things compile
and are weeping.
Things germinate
and there are expenses,
dialogues, unpleasant ones,
a lunchbox,
a calcium buildup, context.
There are unidentified ankles
and your thumb,
like the gauzy underbelly of a minnow.
Things are tangled, geometric,
unlikely, superimposed
and misaligned.
Sacred, intelligible
washed up
and everything is chemical
and heaving and teeming
with atoms
that are terribly precise.
It’s that way, the same,
with the graceless
and the poised.
You will wait
between the holes
in the static
the flippant noise
thinking maybe she will be there
in the wrinkles
or the dimples of it.
Waiting there for you,
kaleidoscopic she
coffee pouring
serving sipping
missing
all the undoings undone
and unfettered yours
and she’s filleting nights
into tender slivers
slipping
tightened grips
the surface of a dead thing
the bubble between two lips.
Not even truth undoes you
she multiplies above you
and I begrudge
that the saints will never
not love you.
So please permit me this:
Never speak to me about roses.
In truth, there was a time
I believed my debts to have symmetry,
my nights to come in direct proportion
to my ability to consummate them.
Here are the hours to which I have relinquished
my abandon.
Here is the space around which
smoke curls and clouds gather
and this blazing vacancy
is in its own right
the kind of divination I was looking for
during the days I tried on
my father’s rings in the last pew,
pressed in a flatness I now understand
to be reserved for the lifeless.
At the time, I felt myself to be
a flirtation with the immaculate.
What I am is waiting.
What this is is an amphibious affair.
There are things we have no name for.
I do not count the cities
or the outcomes, the times
the litmus test confetti
makes discrete pocks on my tongue.
Everything is chemical
and intact.
And this may be all we have:
Overturned colonies
in the iris of certain eyeballs
and an umbrella for the fallout.
I will with an admission:
Everything is chemical.
There is a space
around which smoke curls
and clouds gather
and it has become the material
upon which I have nursed
a timid array of suspicions.
Believing myself
to be deserving of more
than these tediously pocketed
intimations,
I have wandered into certain hours
and relinquished a few things.
The first prayer I ever said
was a plea, or a bargain, if you will.
And the last will be an order:
Behold, my permanence.
It is an exercise in self-actualization
to repeat: I am intact.
But this is also little more than self-flattery.
And so begins my address:
Everything is chemical
and heaving
and terribly precise.
Things compile
and are weeping.
Things germinate
and there are expenses,
dialogues, unpleasant ones,
a lunchbox,
a calcium buildup, context.
There are unidentified ankles
and your thumb,
like the gauzy underbelly of a minnow.
Things are tangled, geometric,
unlikely, superimposed
and misaligned.
Sacred, intelligible
washed up
and everything is chemical
and heaving and teeming
with atoms
that are terribly precise.
It’s that way, the same,
with the graceless
and the poised.
You will wait
between the holes
in the static
the flippant noise
thinking maybe she will be there
in the wrinkles
or the dimples of it.
Waiting there for you,
kaleidoscopic she
coffee pouring
serving sipping
missing
all the undoings undone
and unfettered yours
and she’s filleting nights
into tender slivers
slipping
tightened grips
the surface of a dead thing
the bubble between two lips.
Not even truth undoes you
she multiplies above you
and I begrudge
that the saints will never
not love you.
So please permit me this:
Never speak to me about roses.
In truth, there was a time
I believed my debts to have symmetry,
my nights to come in direct proportion
to my ability to consummate them.
Here are the hours to which I have relinquished
my abandon.
Here is the space around which
smoke curls and clouds gather
and this blazing vacancy
is in its own right
the kind of divination I was looking for
during the days I tried on
my father’s rings in the last pew,
pressed in a flatness I now understand
to be reserved for the lifeless.
At the time, I felt myself to be
a flirtation with the immaculate.
What I am is waiting.
What this is is an amphibious affair.
There are things we have no name for.
I do not count the cities
or the outcomes, the times
the litmus test confetti
makes discrete pocks on my tongue.
Everything is chemical
and intact.
And this may be all we have:
Overturned colonies
in the iris of certain eyeballs
and an umbrella for the fallout.
//ROSALIE WETZEL is a junior in Columbia College. She can be reached at [email protected].