“My Language is So Dead & Undead” is Kristen Brida‘s supremely bizarre poem from our Fall 2017 issue.

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DIRECTORS CALL ME IN
I’m an on-call death
Consultant now
How is death done they ask me
Is it as still as they say it is
Is it unfaithful to throw petals by a corpse
How can I make the body feel
More or less beyond itself

It used to be such a great question
Where I would slide in & out of certainty
Just to see their faces
But now I’m so bored
It gets boring after a few times
The way people crawl around
Their own sense of decay
It’s a movie loop
And I am a sad moviegoer
with Dorito dust spackled across my face

Today I stood over Jeff Goldblum
Covered in fake blood like this dream I had
Where I poured chocolate syrup over his sick ass abs
His body in front of me in tension
with wound & liddedness

I stared at his sick ass abs
and I put my hair in my mouth as I watched
the director said cut
he asked me if Jeff was believable
I should have said fuck
Yes it is now let me lie with him
But I didn’t let them have it

I said shit on him
Throw some glitter in his mouth

And oh did Jeff have so much glitter in his mouth
And was he more exciting than ever
And what a beautiful direction I told them to go in
And still I did not touch him
Even though that would have been the way to go

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KRISTEN BRIDA‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Delta Review, Fairy Tale Review, Whiskey Island, Tinderbox, Bone Bouquet, and elsewhere. Currently, she is the Editor in Chief of So to Speak,and is an MFA candidate at George Mason University.