I fall asleep with the rain sound app of my cellphone, the app includes distant thunderclap sounds and there are people who recorded or simulated these sounds, and it istime to disagree and thank the dawn. I disagree with this rain, I feel absurd for thesimulation of it and yet my brain waves have come to depend on it, depend onsimulated porous points between the raindrops. Always the porous dream, always theneural authority, the reaction meme, always the authority of always, the puncture ofalways, time spent saying always, the spider legs of always, the sleep command, thewake spindles, the spider leg threatening to break from the spider.
hour entry: I fall asleep with a rain sound
Endi Bogue Hartigan
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“hour entry: I fell asleep with a rain sound” from oh orchid o’clock: by Endi Bogue Hartigan.
Published by Omnidawn in April, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Endi Bogue Hartigan.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Endi Bogue Hartigan is a poet based in the Pacific Northwest who writes in exploratory lyrical projects. Her third book oh orchid o’clock (Omnidawn Publishing, 2023) investigates clock measure, temporal presence in today’s violent realities, and the impact of our obsession with time and instrumentation. Her previous books include Pool [5 choruses] (Omnidawn, 2014), selected for the Omnidawn Open Prize and One Sun Storm (Center for Literary Publishing, 2018), selected for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She is also author of the chapbooks the seaweed sd treble clef (Oxeye Press, 2021) and silver and rust (collaboration with Linda Hutchins, 2011), as well as work in journals and collaborations. More on her poetry is at endiboguehartigan.com.
This collection speaks the language of the clock as a living instrument, exposing the sensory impacts of our obsession with time. In oh orchid o’clock, lyrics wind through histories like a nervous system through a body. The poems speak to how we let our days become over-clocked, over-transactional, and over-weaponed. With an instrumental sensibility, Endi Bogue Hartigan investigates what it is to be close to time—collective time, with its alarms and brutalities, and bodily time, intricate and familial. She considers how can we be both captured and complicit within systems of measurement, and she invites us to imagine how to break from, create, or become immune to them. Her poems use language to expose the face of the clock to reveal how gears press against interconnecting systems—economic, capitalist, astronomical, medical, governmental, and fantastical.
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