Films Of The Dead
By Cheyenne Nimes


IN THE FILMS I starred in as a girl, the elders were

getting older, had jackals pouring from their mouths,

I’m sure they knew they were already dead, & I saw

them kiss, ever so slowly, the kill shot of the sun,

the curved sky falling farther into a dusk that

surrounds this town, the point where the horizon

forgets itself & me counting beautiful eerie tinsel-

colored ufos from a buick GS souped so high it missed

by a fraction what I see, some unidentified signal

the astronomer & no one else knows about... flares,

disembodied eyes... who tranced the sky to look at us

just then, because someone was aware & it wasn’t us,

some redux lonely blue sky beating itself up because

there is something out there bigger than all us but

we won’t see, we see only blank skies, skies & shades

& modes swinging down on us scared, sacred, both. If

--, & all this--, someone somewhere knows something

so light it doesn’t weigh anything like films of the

dead.


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bio: 2009 winner of DIAGRAM’s hybrid essay contest, I just graduated from the nonfiction writing program at Iowa. I was a 2009 writer in residence at the Iowa Art Museum. An e-chap Coming Apocalypse Attractions has just come out on Gold Wake