Bella Li

The Twenty-second Voyage

 
 
Back then the fallout had been sporadic and highly variable. First the owls, dying in great numbers. Across the wastes of high-rises in decay. Bones of animals collecting. In the yellow zone the streets were vacant and undulating, sun stretched through infinite spans. Walked between statues, lain on their sides. Counting the means by which the dead return, upstairs in the foyer of the grand hotel. In the auditorium Elvis stuttering to life; electric hits, flies on stage. You ain’t nothing but crying, crying all the time. The terrors of a terrible age. At the end of the hall stepped onto what had once been a terraced path, garden-enclosed. From which you could, in the time before. I’ve never seen a real, or found a live, wild. Pulleys and circuits and turrets and gears. And we imagined this would be a friendless world. Today we are higher than yesterday. Tomorrow, up at dawn—the climb, the sudden levelling of the path into.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Note: “The Twenty-second Voyage” includes text from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (London: Orion Books, 1968). The poem also borrows images from Dennis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and its title is drawn from Stanislaw Lem’s The Star Diaries (first English translation by Michael Kandel, published by The Seabury Press, New York, 1971).

Bella Li is the author of Argosy (Vagabond Press, 2017)—a book of poetry, collage and photography—which received a commendation in the 2017 Wesley Michel Wright Prize competition, was highly commended in the 2017 Anne Elder Award, and won the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her latest book is Lost Lake (Vagabond Press, 2018), which has been shortlisted for the 2018 Queensland Literary Awards.