Death Among the Menagerie
We just made this up on the spot…
Daryl was this very beautiful girl, very
athletic, strong, who could play this
naïve waif/child/woman and also be
very dangerous. She’s like a doll going
crazy.”
— Ridley Scott
A woman can make herself
up
she is part of the collection
she is standard for military installations
when a man enters
a room it may be barrel first
she is veiled dolled
her eyes have rolled she is
still as a machine he is not
sure of what he recognizes
what if she is not a woman at all?
then her body will be
fright wig fingercrack
a terror that happens to him
gun becomes
runway gangway gaze
body as fall fail
what flies from flees
her head thrown back
rapture rupture repose
the flail
the bloodburst body flayed
can be bumble can be
bee bee bee
(won’t my mommy…) his
horrorface
is a flower blown open and
open amped shutterspeed gif glitch
and he can not
muscle its fragrance back
in
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.
