Wordplay

Zeena Fuleihan ’18

This month, we are proud to feature Abbie Cotter ’18 for Wordplay. Abbie Cotter is a senior from Madison, Wisconsin. They are a Physics major with minors in Chemistry and English. When Cotter isn’t in a science lab, they write fiction and occasionally meander into poetic territory. This poetry was part of their final project for Literature and the Environment: Between Eden and the Apocalypse, a topics course taught by Professor Benjamin Voigt.

the narrative

is this: you woke up one morning and things made less sense
than before. the universe tends towards chaos so making less
sense makes more sense and soon there will be no sense left
to be made into anything at all. sliced, diced, molded, sculpted,
scalped, rolled around and flattened. your father always said
you could make sense of anything so long as you had something.

the story

is just words rolling around in your head. she asked about how
you think: words or pictures. she said she thought in words and
that she forgot what you looked like when she went on vacation
for a week. you think about how you can think about the form
your thoughts take and how none of it– thoughts, thoughts on
thoughts, thought processes– is tangible. images flicker through
your mind like an old TV set, and you think about how you’d think
about your thoughts differently if you didn’t know what a TV was.

the arc

isn’t an arc at all. more of a lopsided, rounded-out triangle, really.
not even a real shape. shapes have closure, and all you have is a
winding path that leads up to the cliff’s edge. there’s a nice view
up there of the burning city, but you can’t stay. how will you get
down? didn’t your author say? no, i can’t. it’s not my story to tell.

they record the dead

every body they happen upon
approximate: age
classify: man, woman, child

when your mind slips away, you hope
to be disfigured in death, or
to decay beyond recognition
before they find your body,
if they must find a body

do not consider:
if they measure your body by
the scars orthogonal to your breastbone,
or the curve of your hips

the options are
he, she, it

recovery

one night i dream with my mouth closed
my teeth turn to ash, dead weight laden
on my molten tongue

think of the children:
being born takes a long time to recover from