In My Arms

The power has been out for four days, after a bomb cyclone ripped the tops off redwood trees and deposited them around the neighborhood. Initially, my daughter, well past the cusp of patience, asked for story ideas so that she could write and keep the boredom at bay, but of course, my stories are not what she wants. This habit is about a year old, soliciting my ideas only to find a world of her own—hovering, perfecting the art of the unsaid empty space. Earlier in the day, in poetry class, I had written the word juxtaposition on the board, and we read odes written to ordinary things, like Pablo Neruda on socks, or Marcus Jackson on Kool-Aid. The whole poem exists as a juxtaposition, to be so in love with these mundane, sometimes hand-woven, sometimes mass-produced, yet common things. A mother and a teenager, in a constant, yet common, state of juxtaposition.

She wants to write a story that is scary. I mention zombies because I don’t want to read a story about zombies, and if I suggest it, it will not come to fruition. For a bit, she toys with me, asks me to elaborate. But what kind of zombies? Like, how do they become zombies?

We discuss current trends in zombie land. When I was her age, zombies would simply beget zombies. Now it was more complex, even imbued with mushrooms, like the coffee I drink. I don’t watch zombie flicks, but I know this much. Spores. Cordyceps. The compulsion to reproduce. It reminds me of those chlamydia maps we were shown at Planned Parenthood back in the 90s, the original Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. My surprise when I got chlamydia (the second time even more so), and my surprise when my friend Rachel informed me that she knows Kevin Bacon. I am always so close to everything, especially if I think I am immune.

What if the zombies are babies? Really cute zombie babies? She wants to know how the babies get it. Again, the how does one become question, which makes sense at 14, when she’s on the verge of becoming anything, everything, or possibly nothing, depending on the time of day. It’s a genetic mutation, they are first diagnosed in utero. I want to say, you have always been who you are now and so it will go. Instead, I offer, they begin to force ultrasounds, and there it is, chomping at the umbilical cord. Of course, this is the post-post collapse of Roe v. Wade, and abortions are illegal. Politicians dig in. No exceptions, no crossing the border. Zombie-deniers. Your story should focus in on the mother’s eyes.

They love their zombie babies. That’s what you have to write, how a mother’s love infects her, eats her up, makes her little zombie baby beautiful.

She is starting to walk away as I explain (maybe I am rambling), but you have to understand, the mothers are also infected. They love their zombie babies. That’s what you have to write, how a mother’s love infects her, eats her up, makes her little zombie baby beautiful. Precious.

Ok, mom.

Our home is cold and dark. Down the street, during the peak of the storm, a Douglas fir tree split the green and white house with Swiss paneling in half. Now the tree hangs across two streets, black cables marked with yellow police tape drape across the road we drive to school. The fireman had said, sure, cross it, it’s the only way you’ll get home. Our neighbors are running their generator, which is quite loud, like a slow rumbling growl with an unidentifiable heartbeat. The one machine sound. I secretly hope it runs out of juice before the power is restored.

I lay down in bed and pull the blankets up. My body is slowly unhinging itself from a world I was only feebly connected to in the first place. Outside my window, two redwood trees stand several yards apart, and their tips create a V. Four clouds span this view of the sky, each one the same shape, the only difference found in the shades of sunset rippling up. The lowest cloud bright pinkish gold, the next pale orange, then ivory-tinted peach. The last one is gray and wispy, absorbing into the draining blue sky. A turkey vulture crosses from east to west. Then a burst of songbirds, probably chickadees, makes their way as silhouettes from one tree to the other, as a spider moves at the end of a web, brushing lightly against the window’s glass, until I am asleep, day having become dusk and night too cold to cook.

Before school, we get dressed by emergency lantern light. In the mirror I see details I would not otherwise see if I were using the bathroom light I continue to switch on out of habit. Little red squiggles make their way across my under-eye skin. Are they ruptured blood vessels? Or is my skin becoming so thin that all the inner workings of my body have become exposed? Is my right eye sinking down and causing my jaw to swell, are my lips always this blue in the morning? It’s only 7am and maybe I do want to read a story about zombies.

In the classroom, it’s a week before Valentine’s Day and I have a group of boys who’ve been aggressively disengaged since the changing of the semester. I’d planned a class around Lasky and Oliver, monsters and Pilot snakes, line breaks and empty space, in an effort to win them over. Dark, accessible. But only four students made it to class, and the power is out. I decide to hold off on the lesson plan for a class with more students and electricity, and instead introduce character sketches for monsters. One student asks, do you mean literally or figuratively? Good idea, both. I pass out paper and demonstrate folding a quickie zine, and while they draw, I ask, what are the daily habits of monsters? What do they eat, how do they get around, what are their phobias, do they have favorite foods, and have you thought about an origin story? At the end of class, I ask students to share what they came up with. Every student sketched a character called anxiety.

After school, we check windy.com and AccuWeather and a local blogging meteorologist. Jargon is different than slang, I explain to my daughter, because jargon is specific language used by an industry. Miles per hour or knots, anvils, squalls.

In a parking lot where I have reception, I find: A zombie bank is an insolvent financial institution that is able to continue operating thanks to explicit or implicit support from the government. Zombie banks are kept afloat to prevent panic from spreading to healthier banks. And, Often, you don’t legally have to pay anything on a zombie debt. However, debt scavengers may try to convince you that if you pay them a small portion of the debt, they will leave you alone. Also: animal, eyeball, corpse, flesh, villagers, animated, feed. Words mutating in context.

In the car we eat deli sandwiches and look at our phones for 40 minutes until the wind has calmed down and the waters have receded across the roads, then we return home.

For as long as the power is out, I continue to return to an almost biblical image of a mother holding her zombie infant. It seeks with its body relentlessly, as babies do, as zombies do. Soft hands, reaching. Toothless gums, waiting. The mother’s arms are like a boat for the long nights they both must endure. The first time I had mastitis, my left tit was so hard I thought it would split open. The lactation consultant advised me to keep nursing to allow the milk to finally release. I found using my baby for my own relief both grotesque and necessary.

In the car we eat deli sandwiches and look at our phones for 40 minutes until the wind has calmed down and the waters have receded across the roads, then we return home.

My boyfriend tells me of his love for his mother, and how when he was a child, he would hurtle himself at her legs and cry out “Hug it, Mama!” It implied him, he was a thing in his own mind, not yet a me. This was around the time that, for two years, he baaah’d like a goat in class. Relentlessly, he says, to the point teachers were concerned. I wonder when he became a human me, or a boy, or was he something else until he was a man? A hungry goat, banging his head against soft legs.

I lay awake imaging the next day’s curriculum taking the shape of a conversation. I think about the most effective way to show that what is shared off the page is as powerful as what is shared on the page. In my before-bed trance, I imagine passing out a book of poetry that is only empty pages, and so powerful is the metaphor that the students and I never write again, having transcended the need to communicate anything at all.

Part of the problem in writing my own zombie story is that I can’t pinpoint who the zombies are meant to be. I think of naming them Mitch. I think of them as the collective consciousness. I think of them as miniature zombie men in toy-sized monster trucks reeling around the inside of a womb. But mostly I think of the mothers, and how they fight to keep their babies, even as the underground abortion movement gains momentum. For one night drenched in the eerie silence after the storm, before my neighbors have stopped by and eight days before the power is restored, I am overcome with images portraying the persecution of poor pregnant people as bearers of the end of times. The compulsion to reproduce, zombies be damned (or blessed, holy, family?). The memes, the t-shirts, the posters. All brilliantly born of the culture war. But I can’t think of a single slogan, which I blame on my generation, which at times can be too detached to be clever.

Months ago, a friend declared that I live in a world defined by personhood whether I like it or not. We had been planning a writing workshop on speculative abortion, based on her grad school thesis. She wanted to explore complicity and the uncomfortable places where law and philosophy eat away at our bodies; I wanted to provide prompts about birds to unlock the subconscious mind. She felt exhausted by this, trying to imagine how birds give abortions. The beaks and talons being cumbersome. Hypocritically, I am interested in stepping out of the world of personhood (urban, doctrine, sidewalk) into a world where everything is connected (lichen, understory, watershed), except for the idea of personhood. The conversation at a peak tense moment: Do birds even have abortions? Which really meant: Are we so alone?

Often, she and I end up agreeing that language is limiting at best. That to do the work we want to do, we need to start with new definitions of words we haven’t yet said aloud. What’s the word for gently killing something you love? If we don’t have the language, we don’t have the imagination. Liberation built word by new word.

The zombie abortion clinic was a catastrophe. From ideology to supply chain issues, from contagions to underpaid staff. The unions bat around who will organize them, all decline. Talking heads used to debating the rights of corporations veer into the waters of zombie personhood. At what point does a corpse retain rights? Must it be undead to exert agency? Zombies are certainly viable, relentlessly viable. Does their heart not beat? Yes it does, yes it does.

Things I do before my friends do: Have a baby. Get a divorce. Move to a small cabin in the woods with my daughter. Evacuate the neighborhood before the bombogenesis.

During the storm (bombogenesis is a storm that undergoes rapid strengthening), small animals went sailing. Cavity nesters, along with the red tree voles, wandering salamanders, and the trees themselves, hit the ground and did not get back up again. Not far from my home, I find the nest of an acorn woodpecker family strewn across the road, one egg and several bodies. The birds are black with red and white faces. Such extreme colors side by side, not a blur or blend to be had.

Acorn woodpeckers build their nests to house up to 16 communally living birds at a time, both breeders and the not-yet-breeding sharing space. When it comes time for the females to lay eggs in the shared nest, the other females will take the first egg to a nearby tree, crack it open and feed. Another female will lay a second egg (could we infer hesitantly? eagerly?). The same fate befalls the egg. This will repeat until every female has had a chance to lay an egg, all of them devoured. Only then will the woodpeckers start the cycle again, but this time, they do not eat their offspring. Ornithologists call moments like this cooperative polygamy and reproductive strategy. I gather the bodies and egg to bring them to a nearby stump. The deep green of moss is juxtaposed against their still bright forms.

Things I do before my friends do: Have a baby. Get a divorce. Move to a small cabin in the woods with my daughter. Evacuate the neighborhood before the bombogenesis.

On the night we stay at the hotel (no trees spotted except for a palm tree in an adjacent parking lot), my daughter complains about the lack of space, positioning herself as far away as she can from my boyfriend and me. I ignore her exaggerated suffering, happy to be in a small room with the both of them, the dogs sprawled between the two neat white beds, the midcentury cement walls recently painted and unmoved by the wind. When I gave birth to her, meaning the exact moment I felt her leave my body, my lungs took a double deep breath and my organs shifted back into place. The amniotic fluid and blood drenched my backside. The bed became a canoe. I could not stop paddling with one arm, holding her in the other. And she nursed, and she nursed, and she nursed.

Of course, the politicians don’t dig in, they dig out. Red and Blue united for abortions! Abortions for life! They work to codify language into the Constitution. Then come abortion stipends, paid time off. Do your duty, abort today! Mass carpools set up to funnel women from clinic to clinic. No trimester too late. Queer folks, you’re included, too! Abortion doula training courses offered at junior colleges across the country, midwives licensed to provide abortions at home. Then comes the day, abortion leaps out of the hands of experts and into the hands of the masses. Menstrual extraction jars given out with pamphlets at Whole Foods, YouTube tutorials disseminated by grandparents. Abortion parties had, balloons hung, stickers passed out. I got an Abortion Today! The flag rippling behind the words, everyone changing their profile pictures.

A student asks me in class, what would you write an ode or anti-ode to? I struggle to find an authentic, age-appropriate response. Mochi, I say, I love the way it subtly jiggles. And… the County for not prioritizing poor rural folks during disasters. The kids nod, looking at the empty seats in class.

Which type of mother am I in the story? I think about an ode to the relentless. How quickly it can cascade into an anti-ode, the heartbeat of hyperbole, dragging you this way and that across the page. Who you love and why, how you could start a whole new language for your daughter so that when she becomes infected, she knows how to act, how to receive, how to wait. So that she can answer her own question of how does one become. How to collect the bodies of birds. We are cavity nesters too, making homes out of empty space. My split breasts, my open-mouthed babe, stanza after stanza. When the poetry class is over, both of us hungry for the expanse of a page so that we may write our own versions of a scary story with ample experiences left un-fleshed, before they turn the power back on.