Two Poems by Nicholas Montemarano

Death Is Optional

So, you’d like to escape an apocalypse
of your own making. We could hang you
upside down in a tank of liquid nitrogen,
or upload your brain to the cloud, but we believe
that hardcore biohacking is the way to go—
or never go. If you take these one hundred pills
every day, if you wear this cap that shoots red light
into your scalp, if you sleep with this ring
on your penis to track erections, if you drink
this shake made of blueberries, kale, fish oil,
and un-Dutch chocolate, if you get young blood
transfusions, 90 will be the new 30.
Forget beer, or sex at one a.m. Eating a cookie
is an act of violence. You might be thinking,
what about nuclear war, solar storms, plague,
or some other grey swan event. We’ll have pilots
on standby to fly you to your personal doomsday
bunker. It will be surrounded by a moat of fire
and cannons that can down copters
and blow rainbows into the air. A rotating fireplace
will lead to a safe room only your fingerprint
can open. You’ll have your own militia, of course,
and a team of doctors, a dentist, a shrink,
swimming pool, wine vault, holographic entertainment,
simulated sunlight, bed made of gold, and sex dolls.
The walls will be murals of the Bahamas
and Belize and your childhood home in nowhere,
Nebraska, where you helped your father thresh corn.
Press your finger to the paint to remember
lying in a field at end of day, staring up
into clouds that knew nothing of the dot.com
billionaire you’d become. Worst-case scenario,
some black swan event, a submarine will sail you
to a backup bunker on a remote island
in the Pacific. The immortal jellyfish lives there.
When it gets sick or old, it starts life over again.
In theory, it can do this forever, but in reality,
most are eaten by other jellyfish. Some were alive
when an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs,
millions of years before the world dreamed up
anyone like you.

Sonnet Beginning with Revelation and Ending with Genesis

The first woe has passed. Behold, more woes
are still to come. My mother is gone, but others—
my wife, for one—will eventually go. Not tomorrow,
please. Not before me. Impossible to know sorrow’s weather—
whether a common cold, lo and behold, is a snowstorm
in the lungs. That’s a metaphor for whatever
will take her. Cold, these thoughts. I don’t think so.
To imagine losing her lets me love her
more. I tend to make saints of the dead
and take the living for granted. So, why not dream her gone
before gone, not a hair on her pillow, her side of the bed
empty. Someone said to die is to live, to lose to gain.
Given givens, I hope so. May I feel what needs to be felt
not tomorrow but today. And behold. And be held.

Nicholas Montemarano is the author of five books, most recently a memoir, If There Are Any Heavens (Persea Books, 2022). His poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Hopkins Review, Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, and The Best American Poetry 2025.

14 April 2025