Bill Gottlieb

My Zombie Resolutions
for J. in January

Zombies are popular, pop a heart like a chocolate, populate my cranial innards with their gunning hunger.

Green powder—green, the hue of the new; New Year’s Eve the exordium to my dream—resurrects the deathy hellions, hairy and clawed, archaic as chaos.

I resolve to completely digest my wife, dead two years three days ago; relish today like there’s no tomorrow; get on with my life, get it on, get off. Get off me, old girl, dewy ghoul, hole in my mess of head, my meat of heart.

I resolve to stop death from gourmandizing my strangely boyish face—though not as youngly Jungian as the teens asleep on the floor in the gym, zombies breaking in, teaching those kids’ ids a toothsome lesson: Wake up and smell the coffin!

I resolve to wake up, up and away, take off like a parody of a rocket, gravity zero, levity won, enjoy my inner dinner for two—for me and for unmentionable you, you, not the living dead but the living proof.

eating the cat
food the can-
do old dog