Zombie Love

	Once something dies, you can’t make it live.
		-Connor Oberst

All the stories are filled with resurrection.
On the news, a man in Oklahoma
prophesizes the dead rising from the closed earth
like hot air balloons.  I see them, clasping
the green limbs of each tree
as they are vacuumed to the sky.
No different than Persephone
pruning her orchard, blazing
between the fertile and frozen,
the death and rebirth that mark time.

We try electricity, a frothed mouth
monkey loosed from its cage.  
We strap ourselves to the storm
waiting for the whip crack
of lightning to burn black the white lab
coat, our sewn bodies Igored together.
We moan in our separate rooms,
watch the glassy-eyed ice dissolve
in our drinks.

Half a map from you, the cicadas are sounding
from their seventeen-year slumber.
They dig up from the ground like Hollywood
vampires, clicking their tymbals
until the world is deaf with their miracle. 
You call me, and the phone rings
violently in the night. I want to wake
from the dream I’m having,
where zombies drift through the streets
like oil paint sailboats,
touch one another
with the slow-wristed back of their palms.
But I can’t, because in the dream,
there is so much hunger,
and it’s the only thing
that makes me come alive.

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