At the second
shot time
slows:
the siren, the red
light (in my memory
flashing against the bright
pane: my mother
has sent me down to let the men
in and in
the men come to carry out
my father: my body
struck against the wall to make
room for his still
living body the stretcher
[to carry out: as duty burden])
at the third shot
the hole in her body blown
open: through glass
and slow what is memory
but this: now, stretched
open her jacket flaring back
(black night the neighbors out
on lawns, drawn by light)
then snow—fake
bodies dressed like hers she falls
final, angled, clipped
-winged
(like your own angel
they’d tell me:
that missing that all seeing)
like Leon, I was struck
open watching it happen:
to bear: as witness, as carry
to commit: as
to memory]
This selection comes from the book, Everything Seems Significant: The Blade Runner Poems, available from BlazeVOX [books]. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Donna Vorreyer.
Jan Bottiglieri lives and writes in suburban Chicago. She is a professional editor, as well as managing editor for the poetry annual RHINO, and holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. Jan’s
work has appeared or is forthcoming in more than 40 journals and anthologies including december, Rattle, DIAGRAM, Willow Springs and New Poetry from the Midwest. Jan is the author of two
chapbooks, “A Place Beyond Luck” and “Where Gravity Pools the Sugar”; her first full-length poetry collection is “Alloy” (Mayapple Press, 2015). “Everything Seems Significant” is her second full-length book.
Donna Vorreyer is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013), as well as eight chapbooks: The Girl (2017, Porkbelly Press), Tinder, Smolder, Bones and Snow (2016, dancing girl press), Encantado, Illustrated by Matt Kish (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2015), We Build Houses of Our Bodies (dancing girl press, 2013), The Imagined Life of A Pioneer Wife (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013), Ordering the Hours (Maverick Duck Press, 2012), Come Out, Virginia (Naked Mannequin Press, 2011), and Womb/Seed/Fruit (Finishing Line Press, 2010).
She currently serves as a staff reviewer for the journal Stirring: A Literary Collection and Rhino Reviews. Her poetry, fiction, and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Sugar House Review, Diode, Waxwing, Juxtaprose, Poet Lore, Border Crossings, Harpur Palate, and Quarterly West, and anthologies such as A Face to Meet the Faces (2013) and New Poetry from the Midwest (2015). Although she does not have an MFA, she gets an education daily in her life as a middle school English teacher.
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