zombies

My poem "Zombies," originally published in Gloom Cupboard.

Zombies


In the cemetery, right before rainfall, a man
lumbered towards us with a bad leg
and a wrecked face. You told me

he was coming to get me and there,
before our father’s plot, I thought the man
a widower who had just placed flowers

in front of his wife’s grave,
until the sky broke into thunder,
and he came upon you, strangling you
to the freshly clipped grass. I kicked

off my heels, scrambled
past tombs, towards the Dodge.
Later, in the second story

of an abandoned farmhouse, before the light
runs out, I stand in my gray trench
and bare feet. Through a space between

the boards on the window, I look
out onto all those people
staggering on the front lawn

from out onto the hills
where the sun sets, desperate to see
your black frames. Later tonight,

I will be attacked, I will wake
in my new state to stumble through
fields overgrown, back

to the cemetery
of our father’s plot
where we will find him:

all bones
and together,
the vultures won’t bother us
and we will just walk.


-Jeffery Berg