To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse by Burlee Vang

To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse

by Burlee Vang

The moon will shine for God

knows how long.

As if it still matters. As if someone

is trying to recall a dream.

Believe the brain is a cage of light

& rage. When it shuts off,

something else switches on.

There’s no better reason than now

to lock the doors, the windows.

Turn off the sprinklers

& porch light. Save the books

for fire. In darkness,

we learn to read

what moves along the horizon,

across the periphery of a gun scope—

the flicker of shadows,

the rustling of trash in the body

of cities long emptied.

Not a soul lives

in this house &

this house & this

house. Go on, stiffen

the heart, quicken

the blood. To live

in a world of flesh

& teeth, you must

learn to kill

what you love,

& love what can die.

This incredible poem was originally published on the Poem-a-Day website on December 20, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets. You can see the poem here on that site.

There's so much in this poem I want to draw your attention to first! Argh!

Okay, I will start with the line breaks. That first one is especially powerful:

The moon will shine for God

but this one is also just as good--misleading, fun/horrifying, hopeful/nope, not at all:

. . . Save the books

I need to say that I have watched zombie films and TV shows--not the super gory ones, and even during the ones that do not rely on gore I spend a lot of time with my eyes closed. So this poem--a poem about zombies--appealed to me immediately. Also, it proves that there is literally a poem out there on every topic you can think of (and even the topics you cannot think of). I tell people this a lot because I hope it will pull more people into poetry--no matter what your interests, life experience, hobby, hopes, sins, goals, etc., there is at least one poem out there that will make you feel the poet wrote it just for you!

The sentence in the poem's 3rd line--"As if it still matters."--does not only need apply to a zombie apocalypse. This poem was written and published before Covid, before our escalating environmental disasters, before the current right wing insanity. And yet, those words seem to get to all of us during these hard times, verbalizing the feeling that all is lost. We do not need zombies to make us feel hopeless.

This poem is so bleak--books are for fires, because the only things we need to read are signs of zombie movement. Cities are empty. Houses are empty. The world is empty. But if we read this as just a pop culture bit of FanPo (I think I just invented a term), we can relax and enjoy the poem. I know I was smiling throughout, even as I was acknowledging the horror it is putting forth.

I love how Burlee Vang describes the zombie world--"a world of flesh/& teeth." In this context, those two body nouns together make me cringe.

And the ending will resonate with those of you who, like me, have watched the Night of the Living Dead, The Walking Dead, and 28 Days Later series. But there are many other times that people are pushed to extremes and do what would normally be the unthinkable; I am thinking of the Donner Party, the Uruguayan rugby team, and the suicide of Miroslav Kukliš, but there are many extreme examples throughout history. And there are many lesser examples--we probably all have a scenario in which we did something to save ourselves or to save another/others that we would not have guessed we had in us.

I think the short tercets help this poem move at a fairly quick pace, which matches the content. I also liked the "Go on" in the 8th stanza. The speaker talks directly to us with that small phrase and, if like Rick Grimes we've just awakened from a coma and are in need of guidance, he is giving us advice on how to survive. But it is the bitter advice of someone who is very jaded.

I wish to share that I first saw Night of the Living Dead in the best possible way. It was the mid-1970s and I was at a slumber party. We were sleeping in a enclosed porch, about 8 of us in sleeping bags, and this movie came on about midnight. As we were watching, early on, a thunderstorm started. Of course, prior to this we had done the requisite Bloody Mary and levitation so we were already primed for otherworldly events.

That was my friend Phoebe's slumber party, and it is her birthday today. It may have been a slumber party for her birthday (I cannot remember). Happy Birthday to Phoebe and may all of us have happy birthdays this year and may none of us ever experience a zombie apocalypse that is not on a screen.