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WILLIAM NEUMIRE

American Vampire Movies


The low budget, where vampires are Texas whores
camped in some desolate town they’ve taken over.
The heroes drive an El Dorado rigged as a vampire-hunting hearse
equipped with garlic, wooden stakes and stolen holy water.

None of them are condensed into saints: they’ve murdered,
lied, fallen out of the bodies of their prime
and are just being coaxed awake
from a hangover, hardly recalling their life since graduation.
Their only motivation to hunt is sublime:
vampires tore up the all-night diner and ruined the only clean meal
they’ve eaten this year. The sun is insistently low
when the action begins, when the subplots unfold
and it’s revealed that the villain could be anyone,
wrong place and time, seduced, hungry.
No one is proud when the fanged ones expire
into ash; it’s just what had to be done to keep the peace,
to preserve the art of the moment, which is necessary,
and necessarily negated by those who live forever.



William Neumire's work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Los Angeles Review, Stone Canoe, Main Street Rag, and Rattle. His chapbooks include Resonance of Kin (Pudding House, 2003) and Between Worlds (Foothills Publishing, 2003). He teaches in Syracuse, NY. (wjneumire@msn.com).



Boxcar Poetry Review - ISSN 1931-1761