little apocalypse | kristy bowen

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little apocalypse ° Kristy Bowen ___________________________________________________________________________

apocalypse theory: a reader ___________________________________________________________________________

MY APOCALYPSE SCENARIO begins with wasps and ends with too many raccoons knocking over garbage cans. It's all mongrels and barbie dolls, and nothing to do with jesus. Only a small breathing, some quick hearted thing moving under the stove. I was doe-eyed, dolled-up, and standing in the center of a ring of ponies when it came for me, the circle collapsing inward with the weight of its own emptiness. My apocalypse theory was nothing if not crudely wrought. Nothing if not over the top. We referred to it as the "scottish play" but everyone knew better. All the small horses wore exquisitely embroidered headpieces and sad caged looks. The end of it all was at the end of a great big rope. The end of it all was moving faster toward us, but always farther away.

MY APOCALYPSE THEORY begins as a tiny machine, gears turning over and an approximation of feathers.

My apocalypse theory is inconsolable when I say no, huddles underneath the overpass and calls me at 3am. He says there is too much Texas in Texas, too much wideness. I tell him what doesn’t kill him makes him stronger, but he keeps adjusting the wax wings on his back and mumbling about airplanes. There is too much highway in Texas, bright and clean and filled with tax dollars. Too many open spaces and combustibles. His gears crud up with oil residue. I imagine him with a smear of ash across his cheek and a pocket full of rusty bottle tops. I imagine he is holding a match and just waiting for the right wind.

MY APOCALYPSE THEORY needs more white space. More space around the thickness of things. More space suits and dirty go-go boots. To say it was a party would be a lie, but sometimes it was like a dinner gathering of your very best assassins. Knives in the bundt cake and everyone eyeing the cadavers. I needed more rope, so we made a game of it.

Made a harness out of bed sheets and lowered me down. At the end of the week, I had eaten my way through the beginning of things and was starting on the house. Had sharpened my incisors into tiny points that hummed when I touched metal. Everyone kept throwing up all the broken doll parts. My fingers were slick with all that sugar.

THE PHARMACIST LOVES MY APOCALYPSE THEORY like a son. His nights are full of snow and broken dishes, but he’s all about the bad decisions. I still have my mother’s hands, and sometimes, they fumble over details, stumble against door jambs and make a teakettle sound. Hand over hand, mind over matter. People were dying in their parked cars and I kept dreaming the bed was a boat was yet another bad decision. The pharmacist spent too much time jaywalking and not enough time adjusting the optical illusions.

Everyone’s retinas were scarred and wide like scared deer.

Everyone’s hands looked like my mother’s especially when they were washing the dishes or especially when they were waving goodbye.

MY APOCALYPSE THEORY always says California like that, slow and full of vowels. Like it's a state made out of pink cotton candy and dead letter offices. Made out of water, room temperature, still in a glass. By now all my insides are outsides. All my outsides tethered against me like enormous stuffed animals. I fear going mostly because I fear I will never come back. I fear coming back because it's mostly like going over and over again. My apocalypse theory loves the revision. The overwritten mix-tape. Loves my insides, the actual inside not the made up, made-for-tv version. My apocalypse theory always says California like it's a threat.

MY APOCALYPSE THEORY teaches me how to get radio signals in the filling of my teeth. Teaches me the cut throat, the lindy hop. I loved the gin, but hated the broken clocks we kept having to throw out. I was joking when I said my ears were bleeding, but I was bedding the strangest men and my wires got crossed. I called it my wreckage period, only in french. My blue suite. I kept emptying my purse on the bed and searching for quarters. I've been stockpiling air fresheners in the laundry room. All I need is a paper bag and a candle.

MY APOCALYPSE THEORY likes it when the hillsides are all on fire. When I place my hand over his eyes while driving. The flicker, flicker, of passing headlights. In the abandoned paper factory, all of the chairs were chained to the floor and I had the strangest cancer, like hundreds of pigeons stopping up my lungs. I needed a gas mask. I needed a drink. The inside of my mouth was lined with silver nacre and slippery. Really, I was bleeding all over the place. Going down and down into the furnace until my hands were blistered and peeling. It was the worst sort of trespassing, but the best sort of torture porn. I used a rolled up newspaper as a lantern and kept coughing into my sleeve. My apocalypse theory likes my hair when it smells like smoke. My apocalypse theory likes it when I don't say stop.

MY APOCALYPSE THEORY is patient, but only so far as I keep to the itinerary and don't complain about the nausea Mostly, I'm troubled by bridges and faulty ball bearings. Obsessed with braided objects, broken machinery. I keep losing my shoes along the sides of roads we never return to. My apocalypse theory talks about plastics and nuclear energy as if they matter anymore, but really he's saying I love you with his eyes. With his dirty fingers. He's a little amazed when I walk into traffic. And still a little amazed when I walk out alive without a scratch.

WHEN MY APOCALYPSE THEORY WAS BORN, I was wearing a wig and crying alot. All sewn up, all sold out. I carried a rope, a rape whistle in my pocket, but my vowels were still sugary and soft like warm bread. My apocalypse theory was just beginning to see the error of his ways when I placed a bullet on the table. Said go for it. Here is the lamp. Here is the desk. In my bedroom mirror I practiced a swedish accent. Drew a perfect line in the dust on the dresser. Here is my bed. Here is the end. There goes my baby. Over and over again. I bought fake compass at the end of a shiny gold chain. In my apocalypse theory, everyone was always falling down while running from something. Everyone was always falling.

ALL IN ALL, MY APOCALYPSE THEORY needs more disaster. Locusts and birds plummeting from the sky. A swimming pool full of beautiful, doomed, starlets. We arrange chairs in a circle. Make up chants about god, wave pinwheels and tiny flags and misread the stars. I wear a mask, but it's a mask over another mask. An outline of a face over the place of a face it used to be. My apocalypse theory lacks teeth, but what it lacks in bite, it makes up for beautiful insects, smashed and legs akimbo on the mounting board. Call it pheromones. Call it ferocious. I'll be half gone before you even know I'm here.

MY APOCALYSPE THEORY scatters beer bottles across the porch. Is all armchairs and armegeddon when the power goes out. But my shoes are all lined up, toes pointed at the door just in case. I was drowning in the beginning, but what I lacked in oxygen, I made up for in radio static. My apocalypse theory likes my hand in his pants sometimes, my mouth as warm and soft as butter in the dish. My apocalypse theory is nothing if not resourceful. I have six rolls of duct tape and a vase full of plastic dahlias. I have a pool cue and a mustang beneath a dusty tarp in the garage. I am nothing if not ready.

WE GO OFF GRID, off our guard. Specialize in intersection, vivisection. My apocalypse reflects like a sonofabitch, but it’s the horizon you need to watch out for, lined with tickertape parades and abandoned Chevrolets, We take only what we need: The purest white stationary dotted with roses. A toothbrush. A hand grenade, I can hide so many things in my mouth by now, it’s ridiculous: batteries, cyanide capsules, packets of splenda. We take only what we need but then we need everything. Razor blades, dead matches, tiny exquisite miniature bears. My apocalypse theory watches as I cauterize a wound on my thigh with molten sugar. A bruise on my arm from some barnyard, backyard, back of the bar violence. Everywhere we go, I keep collecting maps. Keep them quartered and small and damp with spit.

MY APOCALYPSE THEORY is mostly waterproof, but sometimes the dampness makes him hallucinate. On the train, my mouth was filled with horrible things, sharpness and lies and the beginning of stories filled with blood. I'd lull him to sleep with by whispering the alphabet backwards over and over again. Eat too many overripe strawberries and throw up in the bathroom's metallic sink. My apocalypse theory was sometimes charming and sometimes dying, but I made it up as I went along, my heart capable of the most horrible rhythms.

MY APOCALYPSE THEORY is a broken down hotel, a disaster that overlooks another disaster. The blinking sign that unevenly blinks open all night, open all night. I was waiting on the chaise lounge by a dirty pool when he mistook chlorine for chloroform and ruined my black dress. I got stuck in the fire door trying to escape, but it was because of all the knobs on my body he was just aching to turn. Left right, left right, listening intently for a voice coming across the mountains and down into my horrible mouth. I was a window overlooking a valley full of pastel buildings glinting in the sun. My eyes were blinking like a dolls open all night, open all night.

MY APOCALYPSE THEORY and I have a baby we name Fortune. Our baby has a goats head and faints when we say "Boo." Fortune winnies all night and eats through the cotton pillowcase three different times. We keep leaving him in the cereal aisle at the Winn Dixie, but he always finds his way back to us, scraping at the hotel room door with his tiny cloven feet. My apocalypse theory covers his ears and rolls over. Fortune chews through the bedspread and licks the wallpaper clean off the wall.

BEFORE LONG, MY APOCALYPSE THEORY is sturdy enough to build us a house out of scrap wood and empty propane tanks.

I am still pretty. Still playing dollface to his private dick. Still playing along and practicing scales and preoccupied with the fistfuls of cash we make predicting the future in egg yolks and teacups. Fortune hangs out in the trees and we whistle for him to return at dinnertime, feed him bread crusts and bottles of clotted cream. He calls me mommy or sometimes Debbie or sometimes Diana. In the bar, I’ve taught him to sit quietly under my chair until it’s time to go home. Taught him to shake the table legs at appropriate moments and throw his voice. Sometimes we sing a song that we call all alone at the end of the world or sweet marie, I’m coming home. Sometimes the word home lodges like a spoon in our throats.

terrestrial animal _______________________________________

“No dirt means less housework and more time for recreation. It’s QUIET. Easier on the nerves, perfect for relaxing and enjoying good music. But most of all, it offers the average man a proverbial island unto himself.”

1965 Worlds Fair Brochure Underground World Home Corporation

IMAGINE your life here. The naugahyde couches, the faded styrofoam rocks. What to do with the body, once the body has started to disintegrate. The curtains would be lovely in the sun but the pattern makes you gag into the perfect pink bowl of the toilet. Your pink pills circling the drain. There are too many lovers in your house and not nearly enough martinis. In the bathtub, you loll while the lights dim and there is so much static.

Your hair impeccable, the highs impractical. At night, you dream about dinner parties, in front of every guest, a steaming pile of dog shit, your good silver still nested quiet in the sideboard and bleached clean. The perfect pool where your guests swirl perfectly in the green jello mold shaped like a heart.

WHAT TO DO with the word daylight. Sometimes it was so enormous, you could walk around inside it.

Sometimes so small and closed you could place it in your palm. You hide it in the laquer medicine cabinet behind the spare toothbrushes. Your rings floating lonely in their dish of clear blue soap. What to do with a concept, pencils down, hands on your knees. The sort of light that made you float, arms akimbo in the pool, growing somewhere beneath your diaphragm. Oh, it was beautiful, all that shining, the glint of a bicycle rim in the sun, the heat of it against your thigh. What to do with a light so bright it shattered the horizon into shadows. Ate the world like a snake. Where to put all this hope, alive and glowing and growing somewhere in your belly. The god knows what of it turning beneath your sweetly powdered flesh.

YOU DO NOT TELL your husband, but you are secretly building your own bomb beneath the kitchen sink. Secretly plotting what to do with your arms on the awful carpet when they no longer can hold all of you in like a big helium balloon. What then, this human body with all of its detritus and unimaginable expanses of skin, soft and pearlescent. What to do with your hands once your imaginary guests have started puking all over the astroturf. When you were a girl, and yes, you were once a girl, your mother packed peanut butter sandwiches laced with rat poison for your father topside. Just a little every day. Not enough to hurt him but enough to keep him honest. No woman likes a man hurling into the azaleas when he goes to kiss her. No woman likes a cool, sweaty palm reaching for her thigh.

WHAT DOES ONE DO with a body, all that gaping rottenness, even before, your fingers exploring the pink folds between your knees. The pink poodle mobile floating above your bed. What to do with the body then, but destroy it piece by piece. You don’t quite know what to do with your heart now, but still you listen to it thrum under the close fake stars. Tend your little garden of plastic hibiscus, water them with an empty watering can. Still love your husband in his dirty yellow cardigan, his hips and hives and unruly hair. He makes you sick a little with longing every night while you pull the strands of hair from your brush and cry just a little. What do you do with a body like this, closed and underground and shut so tight even the mice have fled.

IN THE BEGINNING, you didn't mind the woman who lived in your mirror. She ate canned peaches and cried in the pink, pink bathroom, but she could make a mean cobbler and talk about the best way to clean a washing machine. She wore tiny horses on her dress and always buttered her toast in the same direction. She pictured a snow globe, the world swirling and furious around her and her calm and perfectly whole at the center. The world then a beautiful, ordered thing, a puzzle you could put back together. It started with the goldfish floating in the pond. The dark, unruly things that creeped along the perimeter at night, chewing the obscenely plastic roses and slithering in the vents. You half expected one to crawl into the bathtub with you one day. To wind itself up your thigh.

HOW YOU HATED THE WAY he looked at you, the way his blistered hands found the hem of your girdle and pushed in with his fingers. The way the fluorescent lights above the counter hummed over you as he fucked you. The radiation had taken away the big finish, but he tried, rutting, banging your hips against the formica. How you hated the way your skin looked like something swelling and decaying softly, slowly, from your heart on out.

AT DAWN the fake birdsong creeps from the speakers and you are closest to madness. Like madness is a dress you hang in your closet every evening and take out each morning. Slip over your head as the timed lights make the faux horizon glow pink, then orange, then terrible blue. You once asked your husband which way was technically west and technically did it matter? But still, you can't figure out why the cakes go bad so quickly, even under glass. Why he keeps watching the television, its endless loop of submarines submerging and emerging from the ocean and a man with a microphone, his lips moving franticly. Technically, it doesn't matter, but you imagine what July feels like topside.

All badminton games and fireworks and beautiful girls in gingham dresses. The enormous, obscene float of it down Main Street. There are giant beetles sometimes in your pink, pink sink and you crush them with a paperweight shaped like a woman’s pink heel.

WHAT TO DO with the body when the body is almost indistinguishable from furniture. You've taken the scissors to three sets of curtains and are going on the fourth. Mustard roses. Green chintz.

Nothing outside your windows but the smooth stone walls. What to do with the children, each baby grown bright and liquid in the belly and then seeping out onto the blue, blue sheets. Since you've gone underground, every egg in your basket blooms and bleeds, blooms and bleeds. The milk goes bad in the fridge and your husband smears another dab of greasy canned cheese on a ritz. What to do with the body that fails, is always failing, each imaginary moon in an imaginary sky, another moment closer and further from the end. What to do with their broken bodies, the tiny clots of tissue in the basin. Once he caught you weeping in the fake pines. Once, found you hoarding cans of thick condensed milk under the sink. You are loneliest at dawn, but then dawn is relative. Lonely is relative. He pushes balls around his tiny putting green. You place your pills over your eyes in what you imagine is the afternoon.

strange machine ______________________________________________________________________________

duck & cover At night, the fission loves us, lathers us over, makes our teeth glow like low watt lanterns in the dark of our beds.

This town is all carhops and canapés these days, the women Narrow-waisted and waspish. Oh nostalgia, we love it.

Write letters to it in the green light of television sets.

Meanwhile, the men set fire to the jukebox, the junior college, the dead pigeons in the gutters of tract homes.

Oh hope, oh love, we’re filled with sugar and seething into our silk pantyhose. Our bodies as pristine as our mother’s whites, flapping on clotheslines across the low hills.

In an emergency, above all else, keep calm.

In an emergency, keep your tongue glued fast to the roof of your mouth to avoid screaming.

In an emergency---

plutonium baby When his says father says boo, plutonium baby cries all night.

The milk gone bad, leaking and souring in the folds of his mother’s nightgown. 3 am and the world glows with him, even now, before the bombs, before the backyard barbecues and shiny black sedans. Before the open mouth of his wanting grows wider and wider and swallows everything not weighted down.

When he’s grown, he’ll take up with women named Tina, or Charla, or Tiffany. Will tuck his shirts in and talk about stock commodities. Everyone loves a plutonium baby, all new and shiny as the chrome on a brand new bicycle.

As American as apple pie or insider trading.

He’ll twirl the scotch in his glass and say things like “Key West is a sauna this time of year.”

Those kind of manners could be lost or poisoned or dead for all we know. His black shoes, shiny and sure of it.

miss uranium 1954 It’s months before she can recite the alphabet backwards again.

Birthdays. The chemical equation for hydrogen peroxide.

All caught in the foggy nether than begins somewhere in the cerebellum.

On the patio, all the bodies in bikinis float in a thin soup of chemicals, and it’s all good, all gone, all going to hell in an alligator handbag, she thinks, her fingernails flaking away like pie crust. These limbs loosening into ether.

In the hospital, the sheets were white and precise.

Her mind white and precise. She clenches her jaw and meditates on milk cartons, lined up single file on the store shelf. The perfect slices of bread dropping into the toaster. Scratches on her thighs and breasts where the bees went in, and worse, where they demand to come out.

oppenheimers gizmo “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”—Bhagsavad Gita Later, your October will taste like tuna casserole, slightly burnt.

The device is a mechanism, the mechanism is slowly death-like.

Everyone pretend you’re life-like. Like for real. The mechanism rehearses its performance like a pro. The mechanism knows it’s bloodless, nevermind you’re covered in blood.

Knows its way around your pyrex heart. Knows how much you’d love to take the scissors to your bedroom shears, or a match, The flames licking the soles of your heels. The mechanism flickers and glistens.

Sleeps naked beneath your fur coat all winter. The mechanism always forgets to turn off the stove until we’re all on fire.

the angels of los alamos There are too many holes in the walls now, in our bodies.

Morning, and the driveways shine, the desert opens us up, everything bending toward the horizon full of rusted cars and roosting vultures. Our floors creak and the dust floats above aproned mothers vacuuming, the blank stare of their unhappiness burning through the picture window, the neighbors wooden fence.

Bless us now for vacation pamphlets fading on bulletin boards, the low tenor of empty swing sets sweltering in the desert. For the backs of our thighs stuck to car seats. For crumbling baseboards and broken arms.

For death, however far the wind carried it.

the radium girls speak Before the bomb, our jaws wax necrotic.

So patriotic. Exotic the way the camelhair brush strokes the dark face of the wristwatch, our backs bent over our work. But then all of it was work. The great machine of America rolling over us, rolling us over in our beds. Every painted fingernail, every bright doll’s eye eating us from the inside.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but what kills you can set off Geiger counters 100 years later. Can set fires in the belly of industrial barons from here to Hackensack Every lawyer, every great capitalist gaslighting us in walnut courtrooms as our teeth crumble Into our palms. Progress, the great white spasm, seeping into our tongues and softly glowing.

eleanor in atomovision At seven, the rats begin running up the steps and across the patio, The flats of their bellies fat with progress and buffalo nickels.

The quick silver of tiny glass filaments beneath her skin humming with sunset, the vibrato of western sky.

There’s no disaster in this disaster movie, no devastating doom town kitch. Flies buzz the kitchen, swarm the prickly pears.

But all of it pales next to the television's drone, the static of radios just under earshot. She takes to it like whistling in the dark, parking the car out in the desert and fucking the scientist with his endless theories about fusion. His Lucky Strikes littering the tire ruts, the endless Nevada of her.

beach blanket bingo on bikini island By the time your rowboat floats from the field, the bomb yields a thousand tiny blue crabs, a couple hundred sword fish.

The men on the beach are all wearing gray, are all cutting out pictures of beauty queens and lining them up on their bunks. Say what you will, but I’ve seen their dirty fingers gigging into the dark thighs of women.

Spilling their gin rickys and pissing in the streets.

They pretend to be astonished, but carelessness makes their bellies soft as cuttlefish, the artificial light of barracks glossing their teeth paper white.

What vertebrate things harbors beneath their hearts, the dance cards of a thousand debutantes waving in the breeze? What rising tide turns flame, then fury, then five and dime?

Their wives all angelfood cake and maribou slippers. The coconut trees bending in the heat.

seven layer cake In the desert, an egg will fry at 158 degrees, water will boil at 212.

The torsion of the double mixer spinning sweetly through batter, through afternoon fly swarms and furious shining. In the desert, we live big, all neon and waving cowboys, all sprawl and liquor stores.

The quick silver of vanishing cars on the horizon. Everything moving away from the unravelling middle. Toward travel centers and motor lodges.

There's no honey in our honeymoon, no sugar in our saunter.

The back roads open to the broad goodbye, one hand waving from the car, the other palming matches, the ragged map. In the desert, things burn freely, and suddenly. Give way freely and suddenly to gold.

attack of the 50 foot woman You could be happy here, if it weren’t for all the helicopters.

The flock of navy planes flying overhead and the headache of high heels and haute couture. White Sands only dries you out, Drives up the prices of tangerines and good coffee, but oh, you love the way nothing stops your line of vision to the San Andreas, your suitcases all too small to make it to California, that milk and honey dream of poolside starlets and questionably straight leading men. But oh you love the drama of it, the sweep of your Valentino dragging a trail in the sand. The tiny men that woo you with sedans and tract homes in Santa Fe. Caress the arch of your foot with their hands while all around them the desert swarms with dragonflies.

nothing to fear but fear itself In the grocery store, the shelves are lined with sugar, with silver tinted plastic delicacies preserved like bodies.

Frosted and precise marzipan roses. One afternoon falls through another, then another. The dryer rumbles over the sound of children playing outside in the dust, laying dead like soldiers, lining up their dolls along the play lot fence and firing. It’s tiring, How she was sleeping through an ocean full of grit and soda cans.

The neighbor with over thirty parakeets thrumming against the cages.

Her husband in the lawn chair, holding his martini, while the aisles at the Safeway shine and tilt before her like god.

matinee On the screen, the monsters are always female full of egg sacs and suckling tiny reptilian things .

Sliding their hands beneath their skirts, bodies fertile and providing.

On the operating table, everything gleams, everything sharp and slick with mucus, with sticky wings harbored beneath sweater sets.

On the screen, all the monsters are spilling over the dining room table. Down the laundry chute.

Jamming the dishwasher with broken crockery and shiny scales. It's distracting how they wander from department store to drive-in without batting an eyelash.

Shedding angora and talc , bedding lawyers and insurance men while inside them, the body's strange machine mutates and glistens, beats with a tiny reptilian heart.

songs for dead girls _______________________________________

ZOMBIE GIRL takes a bath and wrings out her hair. Zombie Girl draws a heart on the mirror, imagines tiny pink candies melting on her tongue. Imagines lilies in a vase, but nothing appeases the tight knot in her throat where the words drain out. The surface of things as she touches them waver and shifts, but the stained porcelain dulls in the florescent glow, the flicker of her eyelids flipping open and shut. Zombie Girl inhabits the body, but the body inhabits her like ghost in a house, a host of sins gathering in the sink. Zombie Girl eats her heart out every night, but every night, the ghost clamors the body into the water. And every night, she drowns.

ZOMBIE GIRL writes down her name. Writes a letter to her congressman. A classified ad. Dead Girl seeking. Dead Girl seeping through her days. Zombie Girl makes a chalk drawing of her former lovers on the floor beside the bed. Decides sex is beside the point when you are all body, all hunger. All meat moving through the world. Zombie girl aligns herself with the dark hereafter, but only after a couple of drinks.

Zombie girl sets out tiny plates on the table, tiny cakes.

Zombie Girl takes notes on etiquette, her centerpiece a bouquet of cutlery. Her articulation, disarticulated.

ZOMBIE GIRL sometimes remembers a lake. Calls it in her head mother or lake filled with longing. It's exhausting, Zombie Girl thinks, how the trees never catch the breeze. How the sunlight complicates the landscape. Zombie Girl closes her eyes and smells apples, but the room is dark, her hope flat bottomed and reckless. Zombie Girl misplaces sensation, traces a radius in the yard of empty pots and pans and calls it winter. At night hovers over the coverlet, fear itching in her fingertips.

ZOMBIE GIRL can't remember the beginning, but recalls only snow and slowness. The slice of skates on the ice rink in the center of the mall. Her body perfectly placed in the center of a city in the center of a country in the center of a void. Her heart frozen and thawed, the raw tender of it. Her shoulders still holding the slope of neatly folded sweaters in store windows. The soft rumble of the ice machine in the food court. Zombie Girl sleeps and the world falls soft and grey as discount cashmere.

ZOMBIE GIRL won't go home. Won't come except with her fingers. Lingers under the burnt out streetlights near the edge of town and keeps dialing 911 but no one ever appears. It's weird, the sensation of falling over a cliff, falling off a building, feeling the body give way to gravity. She does it over and over again for practice. For the catch in her breath that comes after. Zombie Girl knows her way around the underpasses reeking of piss and heat. Zombie Girl won't go home until it's already way too late.

ZOMBIE GIRL hitchhikes three towns over, but it's a bitch how much she looks like her old self. Dime store lipstick in ravish me red. A tangle of honey hair. It's hardly fair how much death becomes her. Makes her gestures soft like water over rocks. How death hollows her out from inside, slides into the way her thighs spread against the car seat. Death like a moth in a box wings clamoring against the inside of her ribs. The body moving through breath and propulsion alone.

Over and under and over again.

ZOMBIE GIRL dreams she is alive again, but instead of arms she has enormous feathers attached to her limbs. She’s so heavy this way and keeps dropping to the ground without warning. Warming herself against her mother’s oven and loving all the wrong the men. Even her bones feel heavy, unhollow, and useless for any sort of altitude. For any sort of purpose beyond singeing against the stovetop and dropping them to her sides. Zombie Girl excels in the stop, drop, and roll. The lull of footsteps in the hall. Someone, in the dream, is coming to carve her up into dinner. Clutching a fork and dying to stick it in the most tender parts of her, closest to the bone.

DESPITE WHAT THEY SAY, Zombie Girl still has fingers that find their way into the darkest places.

The slickest incidentals. There’s no reward for this probing, no thrum of insect winds, buts sometimes her feet tingle slightly, as if covered by bees. As if knees down, she’s a live wire, her the synapses still flickering somewhere. Her body moving backwards in the water but never reaching the shore.

IN THE SPRING, Zombie Girl rages through seven tattered prom dresses and two pairs of good jeans. Rages through pink sunsets and abandoned swimming pools.

Rages through Dairy Queens and bowling alleys, and then rages in the backseat with the garage band drummer. She rages through two songs and then makes out with her best friend's brother behind the abandoned car lot. It’s intoxicating, rage is, the way it seeps though the body like dirty water. She rages through three school dances and her mother’s Tupperware party. Her nail polish always reads ruby rage.

ZOMBIE GIRL understands the difference between love and sex, even though sometiees they slur into each other like drunk co-eds. The difference between meat and spirit, the pure fleshy tether of limbs and how they liquefy at the touch.

The bright shining behind her eyes.

Zombie Girl understands these things the way she understands the diffraction of her hand in water. The temperature at which snow melts on her tongue. Understands them in the way that animals understand danger and do not need to speak of it.

ZOMBIE GIRL can't cook. Can't look at the tv. Can't find the remote for all the singing in her head. The blankets singe against her skin. The thin membrane of her wearing away like a blister at her heel. The real beginning of the story not death, but disengagement. How the body leaves the body for something else. How she was always wandering down empty hallways, her hands thumbing every lock. Every cock in a pair of Levis idly. Zombie Girl puts out, falls over at the slightest nudge. The body leaving the body for something sliding against her in the dark,

EARLY ON, Zombie Girl loses her appendix. Her tonsils. A handful of baby teeth rattling in her mother's dresser.

Zombie Girl loses her pieces slowly, year by year, then faster.

The hearing in her left ear, the feeling in her wrist when typing. The body is all about failing, about falling apart like an overripe fruit. A loosening of limbs from their sockets, even the earrings in her pocket fallen from her lobes. Zombie Girl collects her pieces nightly and places them in the bed.

Rises in the morning, incomplete, but intact.

SOMETIMES THE BODY sleeps and sometimes Zombie girl dreams about cake, endless miles of lemon chiffon and a knife covered in blood. Every once in a while, the cake becomes a desert and the dryness gathers in her throat, moves through her like wind fluttering the pages of a book, Sometimes the body moves without her, through strip malls and parking lots, the sound of heat moving in the space she leaves behind.

___________________________________________

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ___________________________________________

Pieces in this collection have previously appeared in Eratio, Gone Lawn, birdfeast, Jet Fuel Review, Split Lip Review, Leopard Skin and Limes, and Whiskey Island. terrestrial animal was a part of the 2014 Dusie E-Kollectiv Exchange. apocalypse theory: a reader was published as part of the SFSU Chapbook Exchange in 2013.