The zombie has a panic attack

in the middle of her feeding frenzy

and all of a sudden she is vomiting up

blood and body parts, the partially digest

arms of a newborn, the hindquarters

of a jack rabbit, torso of a Barbie doll.
Her first instinct is to shove

the contents back down her throat,

but waves of nausea overtake,

and she is shaking too hard to swallow.
She has visions of a little girl clutching a pink

dinosaur, Lucy, both of them

buried alive behind the mobile home

by a man with bloodshot eyes

and his zipper all the way down,

saying, “Touch it. Go on now. Touch it.”
She remembers inside the grave

and the way she hurt down there

where he had kept poking her.

She had promised Lucy

if they made it out alive,

she would find him and eat him

whole. Guts and all.
The next thing she remembers:

a swarm of flies entering the grave

and depositing eggs inside her moist cavities.

How afterwards, her whole body hummed.

Later, upon hatching, the noise inside her skin

woke her up. She would never sleep again.
Sometimes now, the hunger is insatiable,

the need stronger than a warning.

Even as her muscles quake, and panic

tightens her jaw, a small child cries

in an upstairs room, and she moves towards it, famished.