Jonathan Minton
I Walked With a Zombie (1943)
The story is about adaptation. It’s hard to travel through time
with the meaning intact, as evident in those silent zombie letters
in corps and doubt. All the great houses are built on deception,
slavery, and cultivated sadness. The master’s empty chair
is for the master, and the mistress is a ghost who walks
and never speaks. Is there a place for love here?
There is not one but many kinds of silences — the remains
of what will not translate, tactics, shared secrets —
god-shaped holes where terror can transform and creep back in.
They weep when children are born and celebrate at funerals.
In this world she is a woman without will, not an angel
reveling in some divine light, nor a wild bird,
pulling at its own plumage. She must keep her health,
and not die, but she can’t dance with a masticated brain,
and people do not die immediately. She will occupy his thoughts
as if she were traveling abroad, or rendered into song.
or remembered fondly as a beautiful doll.
Husbands, lovers, evil spirits — all have their claims.
There’s less to fear in being dead than in being
adapted, in being seen and never seeing.
The Beast With Five Fingers (1946)
The maestro has died and left his inheritance to someone else.
The maestro has died and haunts the villa with strange music.
The maestro has died and someone is murdering them all.
There are no answers in the stacks of ancestral books,
or the documented facts of household affairs.
Is there always life before death, the assistant thinks?
He thought it would be a story he could tell as it happens,
But we don’t know our names when we are born
and we lose them when we die.
He thinks he can chalk it all up to coherent miseries
until it makes more sense. All data are ghosts of a kind,
and we are just animals walking in and out of rooms.
If he’s done nothing wrong, he can believe the sin
isn’t his, but you have to know how to end —
to glide to the sea or crawl, to clutch at crucifix or punctuate it
with fangs. It’s hard to keep these meanings intact
when pursued by a crawling, disembodied phantom hand.
Saint Augustine warns of the dangers of curiosity.
Keep out of spider webs. Ignore the body in the corner.
I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Invasion of the Saucer Men (Double Feature) (1957)
I was a teenage Michael Landon, but I grew up slow, and read lots of Stephen King.
I married a model because I was always pissed, shitfaced, brain-dead.
I was a teenage guinea pig and a free police case. They saved me from the gas chamber.
I was strangely happy just reading Nancy Drew and those tiny edible letters.
I was injected as a teenager by pure alcohol from an alien needle.
I was frightened on my wedding night, so I read even more Stephen King.
I was a teenage bat boy, but I kept it quiet because radios were banned in West Virginia.
I was sensitive to light. I felt like my head might explode.
I was Bigfoot’s teenage love slave. We hid in a heart-shaped thicket of spearmint.
I interfered in the ways of God, or so those secret powers insist.
I was a teenage scientist, but I never had an assistant, never bowed to authority.
I hurled myself back to a primitive form, and started over again.
I was a teenage mole, unblinking, sniffing out what sinks or slips away.
If the aliens invade again, we’ll ignore the police, and rally all the kids in their cars.
Jonathan Minton lives in central West Virginia, where he is a Professor of English at Glenville State University. His books include the chapbook Friday the 13th (Cul-de-sac of Blood, 2024), Letters (Moria Books, 2022), Technical Notes for Bird Government (Telemetry Press, 2018), In Gesture (Dyad Press, 2009), and Lost Languages (Long Leaf Press, 1999). He edits the literary journal Word For/Word (wordforword.info), and curates the Little Kanawha Reading Series.