Back When Zombie Killers Flew Coach and My Brother Got Googly Eyes

The first time my family came to visit
San Francisco, Andrew spoke
to The Walking Dead
actor on the plane. They stood in line
in the tail to pee, & my brother,
that brave boy, said, I love

your show. & that fictional archer
said thank you, shook his hand
in a sky overflowing with technology,
free of zombies.

What I admire about zombies
is their intelligence, their cunning
that persists after the turn
seen so rarely in the genre.
I want the monsters

to be the monsters. So I stopped
watching after season one
when the director departed
& all that was left were mindless
rabid primates. Our mother

did the opposite. When
my brother returned to his seat
she asked, Who was that?
What show?
& she only saw from season two
a world where the humans
destroy themselves.

Matthew Isaac Sobin’s (he/him) first book was the science fiction novella, The Last Machine in the Solar System. His poems are in or forthcoming from SoFloPoJo, Orange Blossom Review, Ghost City Review, JAKE, MAYDAY Magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, The Hooghly Review, Stone Circle Review, Hog River Press, and elsewhere. You may find him selling books at Books on B in Hayward, California. He is on Twitter @WriterMattIsaac and Instagram @matthewisaacsobin. His Linktree is linktr.ee/matthewisaacsobin.