Horror films teach us to fear whatever rises from the grave. Dave Bonta's "Horror Fictions" asks what the grave might make of us. The poem opens on the genre's stock moment, the cry of "It's alive!", and turns it inside out. If being disturbed by the living is the horror, then the dead may be the ones watching a monster arrive. The central idea is that life is an invasion of death's quiet. It is also a kind of luck, and a temporary one, because the living and the dead are bound together in a single process.
The first sentence is a question, and the poem spends the rest of its length answering it. The intruders it lists are a mixed crowd: "roots," "pickaxes," "squirming / purple larvae," "blind snouts." Human tools sit beside worms, plants and burrowing animals, so the "we" is not only people but everything alive that pushes into the earth. The adjectives are tactile and faintly disgusting, which is how a horror film would shoot them. Bonta lets the reader feel what it is like to be on the receiving end.
The middle of the poem gets strange in a productive way. "We are the zero in their bones, / that slick thick marrow, mother / of blood." Zero means nothingness, a hole in the skeleton, yet marrow is where blood is made, so the same image holds emptiness and origin. The living are the dead's absence and also their source. Even the sound is pleasingly clotted: "slick thick" is almost a mouthful of marrow. Then come two images of chance, "unlucky / rabbits' feet" and "the throw of their dice." A rabbit's foot is a charm that brought its original owner no luck at all, and the phrase suggests the living are a bad bet, an accident the dead didn't ask for. The repeated "We are" sets up a rhythm of confession, and "We creep & crawl. We erupt, / dangerous as magma" accelerates it. The jump from small crawling things to volcanic force happens in two short sentences, and the line "dangerous as magma" is cut short, as if the eruption cannot wait.
The poem has no rhyme and no stanza breaks. It is a single block of eighteen lines in loose free verse, with long, talky lines that spill over their endings. Enjambments such as "mother / of blood" and "rest with / our roots" make the reader tumble forward, which suits a poem about things pushing upward. The ampersands, used throughout in place of "and," give the text a hurried, scribbled look, a little like creeping itself. They also keep the tone casual even as the subject gets cosmic.
That cosmic turn arrives at "Someday the sun will bring us / all together." The scale jumps from graveyard to solar system, and the "molten paroxysm" that ends everything echoes the earlier magma. The word "paroxysm" also pairs with the "briefest of spasms" that follows, so a small convulsion and a vast one are set side by side. Until that final union, the poem says, living and dead can only touch in brief flickers. The phrase "briefest of spasms" is open enough to suggest startled movement, a death throe, or the shiver of a body that has just realised something. Bonta does not insist on one reading.
The ending returns to cinema with a clever change of angle. Living and dead are "listed / together in the credits," and what they are credited for is sound: "moan, rattle / & almost imperceptible sigh." These are the stock noises of a haunted house, but here they become a shared cast list. Neither side is the star, and both are contributing to the same production. The final phrase fades out quietly, with "almost imperceptible" dropping the volume as the poem ends. After all the crawling and erupting, the last note is the faintest human sound there is.
The poem is significant because it takes a cheap, familiar genre and uses it to say something unsettling about mortality and ecology. It is funny in its premise and serious in its implications. The title's plural, "Fictions," hints that this reversal is itself an invented story, a way of imagining what we can never know. Even so, it leaves a lasting impression: whoever is buried below us, we are the ones making the noise.