Michael Steffen – 3 Poems

The Dead Can Dream
He loved football, and the Bills
were his favorite team,
another way of saying
he was angry most of his life,
spending autumn Sundays yelling
at the radio then later, the TV,
blue neck vein bulging—
scrappy bulldog of a man,
tossing bromides, goddamning
a blue streak. Six inches!
They needed six goddamn inches!
Why not run the goddamn ball?
Jesus Jumped-Up Christ!
My mother, used to his carping,
sat where she could roll her eyes
without him seeing,
as he fumed at haplessness.
At morning mass, he’d pray
for triumph, another way of saying
he’d beg God for a Hail Mary.
Thirty years working the furnaces
at Bethlehem Steel, he never witnessed
a trophy hoisted by his goddamn team;
and tried to convince me
he’d have made a fine left tackle.
Instead, he became an old man
yelling at parlor shadows,
another way of saying he bellowed
at shades of himself
all those autumn Sundays ago—
shade become a husband, a father,
but not a fine left tackle,
shade dying painfully
of a failed heart, until my sister and I
directed a charge nurse to make it stop.

He Can’t Be Killed by Conventional Means
Death is a blank canvas, but who wants to gawk
at absence or ongoing loss?
Soap writers must know this—
what else could explain why some revered
homme fatale gets burned in a car crash,
shot, strangled, poisoned, shoved
into an active volcano, all of the above,
and returns to his show? In the real world,
he’d perish from a paper cut.
Dying puts an end to all futures,
but for a soap character, it’s only the beginning.
If he were eaten alive by a pride of lions,
he’d resurface two months after the actor
portraying him underwhelmed Broadway
with his lack of talent—maybe as a version
of his former self, but only because
he’d “lived abroad,” fell into a “life changing coma,”
or faked his demise for financial reasons.
His TV wife wants to stab him in the neck
with a steak knife for keeping her in the dark,
but he can’t be killed by conventional means.
She wants him to stay absolutely dead,
but how, gunshot to the head?
People survive those. Set him on fire?
Several have escaped that fate, gotten amnesia,
then reappeared later in the year—
so often, I’ve given up
on the permanence of any death,
including mine. Until I heard Ted Williams
had his head cryogenically frozen, hoping science
could someday revive him, the most convinced
I’d ever been of a soap persona’s lasting death
was Brad Carlton’s on The Young and the Restless—
frozen solid under lake ice, eyes wide, his face
a petrified grimace. Brad seemed really dead to me.
I was almost sure of it.

Re: The Dead
A zombie and a cheerleader work together to show the town of Seabrook what
they can achieve when they embrace their differences and celebrate what makes
them a community. – Disney Channel Plot Summary for ZOMBIES, a 2018 TV movie

It seems that zombies have evolved.
They speak the Queen’s, they celebrate
diversity, build on success and
cooperate in a future dystopia.
It’s the new zombie zeitgeist.
They’re no longer metaphors for
boredom, oppression, grunting
aimlessness, rampant consumerism,
economic enslavement, nuclear
extinction, the Cold War, civil rights,
AIDS, flu, clumsiness, poor hygiene
and genital warts. Now they’re metaphors
for mutual aid, social justice,
reconciliation, dignity in work,
sharing the wealth and a healthy
environment. Zombies are excellent
symbols possessing kick-ass resonance,
but mostly they’re zombies.
Someone once imagined them
gimping across a charred landscape
in lukewarm pursuit, hunting us down
like slow lions on the Serengeti,
lunching on the living, obediently
following their genre’s conventions,
not standing around representing shit.
It’s hard enough living this life without
making things that don’t exist in it
symbols for things that do. Zombies are not
socio-political. They don’t vote.
There are no zombie economists,
mechanics, doctors. They don’t poop or pee.
They have no gastrointestinal pathology.
WE MADE THEM UP. On TV, in movies,
they eat the world. Don’t overthink it.