Many years ago, I attended a dreadful production of an Edward Albee play by a community theater group in Poughkeepsie. Not his masterpiece, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a searing account of marriage as a verbal knife fight, but the story of several grown sisters savaging one another as well as their parents while throwing martini olives at one another, or something like that. I sat numb in the audience fantasizing my own version of this play. To spice up the action I'd park my brother by the window in a WASP-y blue blazer with a rifle in his hands to say nothing but occasionally take shots at zombies moping about the yard. I'd put some fun into these deadly dull proceedings.

In truth, I hadn't seen Night of the Living Dead since my twenties, nor as a budding cinephile at that age had I been much impressed. Give me Fassbinder, give me Jim Jarmusch, not rotting white people with a midnight appetite for human flesh. (Especially not the intestines shared like sausage links.) But age changes us. This time I rented the video and shoved it into the player for the small black-and-white TV that came with my cozy old cottage rental in Woodstock and sat transfixed by this murky low budget classic. I must have watched it half-a-dozen times. Somehow it seemed a veiled allegory for my own family history. My mother, crippled by strokes, had spent a decade in a nursing home not unlike a zombieland for the elderly. My father, whom I took to be on the spectrum, often seemed impassive and zombielike around strong human emotions. I sometimes feared I had some of this zombie indifference in my own relations with people. I began writing poems. Here's one:

Why I Zombies

They've let go of their pride.

They're not vampire aristocrats

spoiled by virginal necks,

or mummies older than Christ.

They're retired plumbers

in boxer shorts pulled snug

on beer-and-potato-chip bellies,

or housewives in dumpy nightgowns

wandering barefoot on the lawn,

hypnotized by crickets.

They're not Frankenstein's

monster with bolts in his neck,

or alien coneheads with 500 IQs

& rotten claw teeth.

They're volunteer firemen

with charcoal puffy eyes

from watching Carson night after night,

or secretaries softening faces

with cold cream before bed.

They're not bikers, hippies, or rednecks,

the stock villains of 1968,

but young men with good haircuts

& worthwhile careers,

teaching high school biology,

or managing a Chevrolet showroom.

All good citizens, they're eager to help

a young crew from Pittsburgh

film a low-budget nightmare

at an old farmhouse. Amid spotlights

slashing the lawn, they shuffle & groan

as cameramen kneel for closeups:

gunshots to the chest, spikes to the head.

They're thrown out & burned

like junk furniture. They have no idea

one day they'll be famous,

terrifying us by being so ordinary.

In 2010, I published a poetry collection, Love in the City of Grudges, which included a section inspired by Night of the Living Dead. For a book tour, I tagged along on every zombie crawl I could find. Best of all was a Friday afternoon procession up Central Avenue in Albany to WAMC's performing arts center for a weekend zombie film feast. There must have been two or three dozen of us, lurching and foot dragging, rasping loud hollow breaths, proud of our greasy white face paint and gashing wounds. (Well, being a bit shy, I'd settled for a touch of white face powder.) Just ahead of me a woman with a regal manner carried a silver serving tray offering a severed forearm. All good fun, but what made this crawl memorable was seeing the Central Avenue residents, mostly black people, stare out from their busy salons and barber shops with thought bubbles above their heads that seemed to say, "Man, these white people are getting weirder every day."

Rosendale hosted a feisty midday crawl followed by an afternoon of outdoor bands, where I decided while reciting my zombie poems into a breezy mic to an audience of three in a dusty parking lot that there must be a better way to promote my book than zombie crawls. The one fellow who did buy a copy wore so much face paint I made sure to wrap his book in a plastic bag so he wouldn't smudge it with his greasy hands.

For a finale, I joined a backyard neighborhood party in Uptown Kingston, not a zombie crawl exactly, though a table with makeup was offered if I wanted to go full graveyard. I didn't. Perhaps I'd had enough of the living dead. After food and drink from a backyard tiki bar, after night had fallen, we headed out into the streets led by a trio of glamorous drag queens in full witchery. No sloppy peeling skin for them. They pranced and preened down the middle of the street staring in their own Halloween fashion show. I lost them on North Front Street, as I recall. Perhaps they marched into a bar. But here's the thing about Halloween. The dead never stay dead. Maybe this year I'll run into them again. I think I'm ready to love witches.