Scream Cuisine

inspired by a B movie from the '80s


The zombie is hungry.
The careless scientist becomes breakfast.
The kind loner looks like lunch.
The zombie is still hungry.
The greedy gangster goes for the gusto and gets gulped.
The zombie is feeling peckish.
The zombie's stomach may be growling.
Listen for it amid the screams. Listen for
a clue to Hollywood's maniacal mirror.

Observe the living dead, never self-conscious
as they do the living-dead shuffle with
masses of hanging flesh, exposed cartilage,
and bloody blood.
But none need orthodonture;
they're able instead to bite through
the security guard's skull in a single chomp!
Look on as zombies slay a slow-footed John Q. Public,
who emotes paralysis by terror,
or is Jacky Q. P. festooned by an awkward script,
mesmerized by all the make-up?

When the brain biters return,
the nightmare confronts teenage love:
Ms. Zombie, concealing her rigor mortis behind
large, still supple breasts and pierced nipples,
makes big eyes at her beau, who ain't dead yet.
On the other hand, breaking up is so hard to do
that the horny adolescent tries his hand
at necrophilia with his lil necrophagous nymph,
thereby risking his own neck,
and gray matter for that matter,
but what matter because what is love without trust,
and besides, viewers might posit, Ms. Zombie could get
more brains out of a pistachio.

Finally, fire, the great cleanser,
offers our celluloid-etched lovers,
now both of the zombie persuasion,
a suicide-pact ending.
Exhibiting a free will
rarely observed among North American zombies,
the young couple strolls dialog-free,
hand in stunt double's hand,
into the Hollywoodian barbeque.
Aghast, the authority figure gapes at such waste,
all arguably created by his own
sick, war-pig experiments.
The End. Roll credits.