The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Trick Mirror or Your Computer Screen by tommy wyatt blake

---

What Kind of Vampire Are You?

Who were you in a past life?

                               You burned your clothes stitched with Aeropostale,
                               rich in lava lamp glow. The fire flickered
                               through these memories quicker
                               than images of naked old men on Chatroulette
                               gazing at your moon-laden skin,
                               crawling with apparitions
                               and online sadness you costumed
                               through singe-red hair extensions.

How were you turned?

                               You wanted it to happen. The way you softened ²
                               in his husky hands. The way you touched
                               in youth group when you were hiding
                               in a holy room swollen by night, basting your body
                               with cloying shadows. You softened again
                               when you wanted him to consume you,
                               when your skin crawled to jaundiced and gothic,
                               when you knew he’d haunt you in absentia.

How do you kill?

                              You asked him to walk you home in the morning
                               slurred by birds and chrome clouds shapeshifting
                               to omens. You thought you were so cool—
                               he said he would leave his girlfriend. He never did.
                               That night, he texted you “küss mich in the crypts”, tempted
                               to delete it from your Nokia phone. You were too young
                               when he asked to really see you, his body seared
                               in the next text, grainy and gray like a graveyard when it rained.

² Loosely inspired by Olivia Braley’s chapbook, SOFTENING

---