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Wake
William Orem

Sometimes I wake in the submarine light
and the cool stranger’s house
of early morning
and get up to pee

or detach the troublesome tabby

and, afterward, returning
to tousled sheets
in the middle of soft, first consciousness
I can’t remember what on earth there is to worry about.

The hurts from decades past are not yet shaken
from their cages;
grains of dawn rest on the banister.

What will be so avidly obvious to day—

all the detailed histories of shame and disappointment,
betrayals, faltered love—
are tightly sleeping, the Furies’
wings all tented; and I see
just for a minute

my actual life happening:

one human person

standing
in a house

as if waiting for the quietness to tell him something.

—
William Orem’s first collection of stories, Zombi, You My Love, won the GLCA New Writers Award, formerly given to Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Richard Ford, and Alice Munro. His second collection, Across the River, won the Texas Review Novella Prize. His first novel, Killer of Crying Deer, won the Eric Hoffer Award and has been optioned for film. His first collection of poems, Our Purpose in Speaking, won the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize and was published by MSU Press. It also won the Rubery International Book Award in poetry and was chosen Book of the Year. His second novel, Miss Lucy, won the Gival Press Novel Award, and Kirkus listed it as one of the Best Books of 2019. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times, in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.

Also, his short plays have been performed internationally, winning both the Critics’ Prize and Audience Favorite Award at Durango Theatre Fest, and thrice being nominated for the prestigious Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

William is currently a Senior Writer-in-Residence at Emerson College.

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