I think, perhaps, she hasn’t been sleeping when her mother and I
are watching television late at night: horror movies
filled with ooze and crackling black and white.
She dances in her nightie, lifting her leg just so, to pirouette,
her movement so graceful, so opposite
the lurch of the undead she has unleashed upon her father
and the first grader, my son who plays
alone, with careworn Legos, unaware of the rotting hordes
scraping with ashen fingers on the suddenly too-thin backdoor
of my psyche.
As a father, I worry about my daughter: the growing, the growing.
As a father, I fear when she turns against me, when she turns
to some boy, some horrible boy with mustache fuzz and pimples
that boil to the surface as he tries to become almost a man.
As a father, I fear her leaving me behind.
But, as a father, I’d never feared she’d leave me behind to be eaten,
to become fodder for monstrous automatons.
I wonder just how different
they are: the groaning, single-minded fiend and the zombie?
I joke, because I have little left to give, little left to hope, as I’m doomed
to this—along with my son, two years her elder, bless his heart,
who will too know the degradation of puberty.
And then, as my petite child demonstrates her pas de chat, I recall her mother
has been spared our little homegrown apocalypse, has been saved,
halleluiah, halleluiah,
and I wonder how, oh how, she will ever survive our daughter alone.
Brian Baumgart directs the creative writing A.F.A. program in North Hennepin Community College near Minneapolis. His poetry chapbook, Rules for Loving Right, is forthcoming from Sweet Publications in 2016. His writing has been published in various print and online journals.