The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Everything Seems Significant: The Blade Runner Poems by Jan Bottiglieri

Pursuing Zhora

After their meet-cute—
the funny prattle, the brute straddle—
it’s sweet pursuit: romantic,

isn’t it, the timeworn battle
of the sexes, that dance; the coy slip,
the glance across a crowded street?

The heart pumps so it’s more
than meat. Her quaint cries
as she runs.

The eye of the gun.


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.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Everything Seems Significant: The Blade Runner Poems by Jan Bottiglieri


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.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Everything Seems Significant: The Blade Runner Poems by Jan Bottiglieri

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.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Everything Seems Significant: The Blade Runner Poems by Jan Bottiglieri

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.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Everything Seems Significant: The Blade Runner Poems by Jan Bottiglieri

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.