Nicole Miyashiro - The Zombie Poem

Notes on “The Walking Dead” Season 5, Episode 12: Remember

When the suspicious, grit-faced crew
comes upon a clean house amid
the zombie apocalypse, you remember
what it’s like to return home
from the hospital,
undressing your clothes into a working machine
and taking a shower ten minutes long
and shaving off the time spent
clenched in darkness with that smell
lurking in curtains beside your hospital bed, that zombie
who craves pumping blood, snapping
sticky jaws toward your face and grasping
with bony, slanting fingers your breath,
hope, will,
right from your shoulders, growling
its cat-like, tacky snivel
as soured teeth close in on
your left eye, but then somehow
you’re able to crush
a blade through dead brains and push out
from under the goopy mess, and here you are standing
at home
blue-hued and sleepless at the window,
all of it in the past,
all of it behind you,
or below you or off
at some great distance,
a drag-slumping stagger
ambling this way, its snarl
sniffing out your scent because now
it knows who you are and you know
what it looks like,
rot-faced
with oozing skins,
wielding hunger cries
in the night.

Nicole Miyashiro works for the PA Center for the Book and has had a handful of pieces published and one Pushcart Nomination. She lives in State College, PA, where she will give her first invited readings at Webster’s Bookstore and The Palmer Museum of Art this fall and winter, respectively.  You can find out more about Nicole at her website:  www.nicolemiyashiro.com.