On Sunday Afternoons

On Sunday afternoons, dad takes mom’s head out of the freezer and places it on the kitchen table by the flowers. She likes the flowers. After she thaws for about an hour, she can move her eyes all around and snap her teeth. That’s when my big brother and I show her the pictures we make for her with our magic markers after church.

Dad kisses her on the forehead and she goes back in the freezer, but only after he seals her up in a large Ziploc bag--to prevent freezer burn.

Dirty Old Peter the Scab Eater

Boys Beware:
Dirty Old Peter haunts the park shadows
outside the public toilets.
Former denizen of the (Nightmare/Shadow/Mirror),
a scrawny, shriveled, imp-like vampire;
in summer he harvests the knee scabs of boys,
a rare vampire mutation.
His modus operandi:
to knock boys off skateboards and bikes.

At twilight,
he loiters where boys first shed training wheels;
Dirty Old Peter hates training wheels.
He appreciates the taste of boy tears.
Remember this: always skateboard in pairs.

Victims describe his face a hundred different ways.
His face is a nightmare template.

Like all boogeymen, window locks don't deter him;
he sneaks into midnight bedrooms
where he licks beef-jerky scabs right off
with his kitty-cat tongue.
He's fond of stealing ipod earphones from his victims,
dips them into his magic green earwax
and plugs up the ears of sleeping parents
so they won't awaken
when he collects screams for his mp3 player.

He hibernates in the winter when boys wear long pants and sleeves,
hibernates beneath the frozen pond like a frog
and emerges as soon as spring permits boys to ride skateboards in shorts.

After coming up from the mud of his pond,
he molts off the slimy tatters of last year's clothes.
Old Peter never bathes his muddy frog skin,
but each spring he steals a new set of clothes
from a boy he knocks off a skateboard.
He is the size of a boy.
He detests knee pads.

Dirty Old Peter always comes in the night to collect his scab,
perhaps even more skillful than the tooth fairy herself.

Vampire Bridegroom

Here is the title poem, which originally appeared in Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction. I was so proud of the way it turned out in the magazine, I decided to name the entire book after this poem.

Here is "The Vampire Bridegroom" from The Vampire Bridegroom:

For my birthday,
my parents gave me a little vampire
in a hamster cage.
I named him Bram.

I dressed him in that outfit from the
Barbie "Vampire Bridegroom Playset,"
and I slicked back his hair
with shoe polish on my thumb
to accentuate his widow's peak.

I added pinprick blood droplets to his water bottle,
from which he nursed
by licking the silver ball stopper,
all the nourishment he needed.

But during the full moon,
he turned into a little puff of mist and
escaped through the bars,
leaving behind his opera cape and bow tie
on the cedar chips.

You see, my id invited him inside,
unwittingly.
Like a bat seeks out a cave,
the little mist-puff slid up into my rectum while
I slept unaware.

Now the Vampire Bridegroom runs in
the hamster wheel of my heart.

My parents took me to all of the best doctors;
at first the specialists wanted to remove him, of course.

They captured glimpses on the ultrasound
like Bigfoot exposed in a forest clearing.

In the X-rays, they found him nestled behind my
sternum like a papoose,
but when they cracked my chest open in the OR,
they only found his abandoned campfire
and old fingernail clippings.

He must like it there inside me
where it's always night and there's lots of
blood to drink,
where he navigates my innards like
a rabbit in a comfortable warren.

Sometimes he leaves bloody handprints on
the whites of my eyeballs
like a little child on the inside of a
bus window,
to say hello I suppose.

He perches next to my jugular like
a hiker might reflect by a scenic waterfall.

The vampire learned to play my optic nerve
like a friendly uncle might play a banjo string,
and he shows me funny pictures of
Elizabeth Bathory's rubber duckies
and Gilles de Rais playing hide-n-seek
in the castle.

And yes he haunts my
private underworld where
a strawberry patch of strange desires
has sprouted inside my underwear,
and during wet dreams
he rubs my prostate like a zookeeper
might pet a beloved elephant.

The doctors tell me that one day
I will pass him
like a kidney stone,
but I know that the Vampire Bridegroom will sit forever
next to my heart
like a husband next to a plump wife
in the church pew
where he studies me from the inside
like a weaver who controls the loom.

From The Vampire Bridegroom

In the Packed Lecture Hall

From The Vampire Bridegroom

The stooped, wizened professor with
wild shoots of hair from the caverns of his ears,
stands at the board,
the tall piece of chalk
fresh from the box,
held before the lecture hall
like a crucifix.

Welcome to Vampirology 101,
he begins,
part Criminal Justice,
part Sociology.
Here we separate the mythology of popular culture
from the reality of vampire life in this modern age.

We have all seen the pop-culture conception of the vampire:
a pair of entwined, rosy-nippled beefcakes with
luxurious manes,
subtle fang-smirks
and bulging riding pants
against a backdrop of Edwardian splendor.

But the sad truth:
the oddly corpulent hobo vampire
collapsed on the sidewalk
in the sky-rise shadow,
imploring passing suits,
his fangs as unbrushed as seashells.
Oh please sir can I suck just a little.
I won't drink much.  Just a little
to regurgitate for my wife and children.

In private, vampires love to gaze into a mirror;
it reflects back their precious inner child.

The little old professor preaches
before the lecture hall with students
displaying every sign of apathy.

In this day of vampire awareness,
he says,
it is very difficult
even for aristocratic vampires
to obtain nourishment:
the regal count bows on the doorstep before
the virginal vision of loveliness.
Count: May I come in my dear.
Woman: Get lost bloodsucker.

A self-defense studio of athletic girls
with taut midriffs and ponytails,
practicing the kick-and-stake maneuver.

Vampires love to teach vampire defense classes.

Vampires must always tell the truth
if asked a direct question.

Vampires persist because they adapt like frogs:
for example car crash vampires,
tanning salon vampires,
and of course pernicious spam vampires.

A boy at the computer surrounded
by a swirl of vampire shadow
spilling from the download stream.

Few know that invitations to enter homes may be granted through email.

Vampires are vigilant nonsmokers.

The vampire professor keeps fangs
cataloged in Mason jars.

Vampire femurs can be planted like trees;
they grow into thirsty bone-white nettle bushes and suck blood on contact.

Undead vampire heads make great pets (safest de-fanged).
The hair is quite luxurious;
the heads do not talk, but
they love to smile like babies.

A Mason jar of vampire blood will always remain
just a smidge above freezing.

At the vampire treatment center,
really a gulag for scientific experiments
to weaponize vampires
for the self-defense of democracy,
special air filters collect vampires that
turn to mist during escape attempts.

In storage, the scientists keep ancient
dehydrated vampires in vacuum-sealed bags,
but somehow they end up on eBay.
Unzip and pour contents into a full bathtub.
Add a pint of blood to the water and let the full moon
in the window.
Soon a vampire will congeal.
Add more pints of blood to increase youth and beauty.
They imprint as soon as they emerge from the bath
like crocodile babies.

Yes, the final exam will consist of ten essay questions,
the professor explains.

From The Vampire Bridegroom 

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Book Description:

From Bram Stoker Award-winner Chad Helder comes The Vampire Bridegroom, his sweeping collection of horror poems and tales that explore the dark crevices of genre in a spectrum of forms. Included here in this horror collage are poems that yearn to be horror movies. From a nightmarish array of vampires in the landscape of troubled youth to beastly transformations and horrifying awakenings... from the twisted theories of Hansel Fruehner--the perverted and blasphemous student of Freud--to scary fairy tales. Along the way, explore the mythos of the Gory Boy and Queen Bloody Mary, encounter the ever-present figure of Satan in the mind of a preacher's son and, of course, meet the sharp-toothed title character himself.

The Playground

Excerpt from "The Playground" in The Vampire Bridegroom:

Once a psychic vampire buried himself under a playground.

Mrs. Hartman's third grade class responded to the subconscious knowledge of the vampire's presence.

The vampire hibernated six feet under the monkey bars in the moist wormy earth. The children built Gothic sandcastles above the grave. When it snowed, they built deformed snowmen.

The vampire loved the tributes from the children.

The vampire had special talents: He milked the spectral life force from the children when they played on the monkey bars. He nursed through a silvery spectral cord, an invisible straw-umbilicus; their little hearts did the pumping for him.

Other symptoms of the vampire's presence emerged:

A schoolboy, stricken with nightmares, snuck out at the witching hour and hanged himself on the monkey bars, still wearing his urine-stained pajamas.

Great colonies of strange ants formed, mutations that thrived off of the spectral energy emanating from the grave, the children all covered with bites.

The children grew weak and gaunt from their offerings.

The children drew their daily crayon pictures in tribute to their master, a grandfatherly old vampire beneath the monkey bars. They drew their stick-figure selves dancing and playing on the sandy surface above the cocoon-grave; soon they added fangs.

Read the rest of this flash fiction story in The Vampire Bridegroom!

Feeding Frenzy

In the middle of puberty
I turned into a Great White Shark;
all my pubes fell out,
replaced by that fish-belly baldness;
my braces tried in vain
to hold back the rows of 

pearly-razor-white triangles,
and the dorsal fin
sprouted from my back like
an erection.

But even worse, a sliver of desire spread
across the ME inside,
a slow crack across a windshield,
and next it opened into
an earthquake rift of need
for Feeding Frenzy.

At first I went to the park
and public toilets,
and giving in was like
cutting the taut pit bull leash:
the mauling and the warm gush.

I got my gills the same day my voice broke.

My parents bought me sunglasses
to hide the black sky of my eyeballs,
suggested I conceal my smile,
and let me sleep inside a cold waterbed,
but they didn't really understand.

And now I'm starting to understand what they
really mean when they say
a shark dies if he stops swimming.

I had some problems at school: 

the vat of chum in Home-Ec,
slicing the swim-team Speedos
with the edge of a tooth,
and then I wiped out the entire wrestling team
in the locker room showers.

In the newspapers they said I couldn't help it.

Now the scientists keep me
in a special tank at Sea World.
All the pitiful Shamu-watchers are afraid
to touch the glass,
but sometimes in the night,
my true fans jump the gate to visit;
it all begins with a simple flirtation:
a warm limb dangling in the water,
a seductive fin creasing the surface,
the playful slap of my tail
as I indulge a stranger's
decisive plunging in.