The Dead Go Bowling

by KT Landon

on Saturday nights at Starlite Lanes.
They like the way black light and neon translate
the dead and the living both into something strange
but half-remembered, a lost dialect of radiance.
They like Journey’s “Separate Ways”
blasting on the sound system, the smell of Lysol,
cheap beer in plastic cups—not nostalgia, exactly,
but the way the past is superimposed on the present,
like an old camera shot where the film fails to advance,
each image occupying the other. They like the crash
of the ball and the pins, the way everything flies apart,
and is swept away, only to be set up again in some new order.

KT Landon is the 2013 winner of the Arts & Letters PRIME Poetry Prize, a finalist in Jabberwock Review’s 2014 Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize for Poetry, and a two-time Pushcart nominee. She serves as a poetry reader for Muzzle, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fugue, CALYX, and Ibbetson Street, among others. “The Dead Go Bowling” is for Laure-Anne Bosselaar.