poem: Kevin Devaney

Love Song for the Zombie Apocalypse

I love the zombie apocalypse because it means that you are free.
Freedom is not the same as safety,
but you walk with fewer hands in your pocket
not as many television words in your ears.
I’d like to say, I want you to be there with me.
I’d like to but,

they will come

and in all likelihood, we will not remain.
We are prime candidates
for gnawed intestines,
unlocked doors and large windows—
love how they let in the light,
hate how they let in the flesh eating abominations—
in all likelihood our bones will snap
under grinding maddened teeth,

or when the backup brigade,
former yakuza katana wielding badasses shows up
a second too late, you bitten,
me carried by Kevlar hands back to an ambulance turned sanitation van.
Even if they get there on time,
get both of us back to the van,
bite free, safe
for a second
until the zombos clutching hands find the pins out of their grenades,
and the explosion tosses the van on its side
a tin can,
rolling through the bad part of Z-ville
a roulette of newly found death sentences.

I cannot think of a way I’d like to see you die,
but I know, if I had my choice, it wouldn’t involve chewing or bodily mutilation because
I really like you. I know it’s a strange way to say I love you,

but if you got bit,
I would shotgun you in the face.
It’s nothing personal,
it’s just how we survive around here.

If you got bit, you’d smell like blood
these things aren’t unlike sharks
the hordes you’d attract would be monstrous
and in all likelihood you’d get eviscerated by starving zombies,
and in all likelihood that’d mean chewing and bodily mutilation, but

love has never been a child of likelihood,
I know we will both die in time.
I still can’t think of a way I’d like to see you go,
but I can think of this:

We build a tree house,
way out in the middle of the woods.
Every morning, we eat the nutrition bars we stole from the grocery store after no one owned the grocery store. You teach me yoga, we both lift weights, because being agile and strong are important now. One morning we decide, if we’re to fight off the zombie apocalypse, we should probably know how to fire a gun.

So it’s during our first daylight raid of the shooting range that we realize loud noises,
like gunfire,
attract zeek, zed and zoe,

the place goes dark because the windows are all hands.

Then,
from the sky
the katana wielding badasses’ helicopter hits the roof,
no grenades no pins,
cause they’re not amateurs,
air lifts us to the top of Devil’s Tower
where, despite guard posts and razor wire,
society has remembered itself.
What is had is given.
We would grow as old as our bodies would let us;
your hair would go white and it would be beautiful.
One day you would pass. I cannot know
the sadness of that day, but I know this:

this is a future we could walk to
if the undead weren’t grating at our options
with their teeth and palms and certain doom.
This is a fate that no one,
dead or otherwise, could swallow for us.

KEVIN DEVANEY is an MFA student at Sarah Lawrence College and a spoken word junkie. He is the founder and Co-director of the Sarah Lawrence College Spoken Word Collective. In his free time, he likes to try to devise new ways for art to intersect with daily life. Currently, he has no website, but his latest book, Why I Believe in Winter, can be found at desirepress.wordpress.com.