Death to Death-Transfigured
/Sarah Klein
patterned on my psyche your mother dies after your mother dies that's my grandmother my echo
of my mother buried does death know I'm about to turn thirty-four does death mirror itself in eerie to
draw the curtain tighter or to release it anew does a mother become an auspice does love stay in the
blood does genetic memory bloom in me as aid or like botulism the hint of it easing the pain but too
much crashing the nervous system become unendurable drag me back what does synthesis or
metamorphosis mean on the eve of death of a single soul or an entire world or on the transparent
threads of care woven so firmly around us what now comes alive beneath my fingers what now
resurrects in my art what now is the imago death wears as it coalesces as emperor?
Author’s Statement:
The title is from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and the inspiration for the work was the processing of the death of my maternal grandmother many years after the death of my mother, who I lost in childhood to an early-onset aggressive cancer. The mirroring of the experience of losing my grandmother while I myself was around the age of my mother's diagnosis gave me a lot of powerful emotions to work through, which is the impetus of much of my work. I had jotted down the title as a phrase I had particularly liked and thought it fit perfectly.
Sarah Klein is a genderfluid poet and fiction author whose first chapbook, Mast Cell Mathematics, a Chronic Illness Calculus, was released with Querencia Press in June 2025. They were also a 2025 Best of the Net Nominee and have been published by myriad other publications including Lammergeier, fifth wheel press, and en*gendered. Free Palestine.
