Wake Up. Time to Die.
Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart’s
curtain? It rose: The scenery of farewell.
—Rilke
To re member – re call:
bring the body back to itself, stitch
by stitch. That itch.
She’s waking up
was not the first thing I’d heard:
it came after the low moan
of the body I did not recognize
as mine. At her eyes are opening
the surgeon paused
behind his curtain
(a bright instrument,
the body opened) until
some machine was adjusted,
hissed its accord,
and I slept. In recovery,
I told the nurse
I thought I was dying! But no —
just coming to — she refused
to admit it had happened. But I knew
what my body was bent on:
opening into the bright rain
haze from the OR lamp array, remembered in light, re-called
to it. Like Leon: muscleblaze
and fight, how long will I live?
…longer than you, slinging
Deck’s body like ammunition
down the black barrel
of his past life: painful/
oh I agree until
Bango! his third eye
bursts open, bright neocortex root-bloom rising,
a streaming forth
unfutured, unmemoried. To be
complete, complicit:
to fade and flower at once,
to know yes as it is happening
that yes: it is happening
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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