Sonya Wohletz

“The moment of the poem is a birth and a total sense of helplessness—for the pill, the speaker—who dissolves in the rudimentary dimensions of intent. Beyond this dissolution are the synapses that inform our sense of consciousness. The fences, the clouds, our children; these are what remain in the open ark of the world. They remain, tracing trajectories, a symmetry of relations that we, in the material smallness of our human designs, cannot fathom.”

Swallow

Sonya Wohletz is a writer of poetry and creative non-fiction. Her work has appeared in Latin American Literary Review, Roanoke Review, Revolute, and others. Her first poetry collection, Bir Sira Sonra/One Row After, was published by First Matter Press in 2022.

Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?

In this moment, in the violence

Even the pill on the tip of your tongue is afraid

of what happens in the dark,

caught between a glottal stop and

tongue to palate pause—

pinked folds where salivary methods dissolve the

firmly formed remark, or regrets

multiply in millions,

all oblong-membraned and not at all special.

Their moment was an hour ago, or perhaps

we all broke down—

the complex symmetry of their false sugars, the

rudiments of laboratory. A heat

duct for a womb, soft asbestos swaddling.

Formica footprints migrating

beyond the threshold where clouds and

children stretch arms out wide as fences,

neverminding the medicines we take.