Adam McGee: The Reenactors

There’s no end to the things they will show us,
the reenactors on TV: falling off buildings,
surviving wrecks, robbing a bank. These girls
were best friends but one murders the other.
This one has a tapeworm the length of a bus.
Often, the show can’t afford for them to speak,
so their stories are reduced to the irreducible,
life as a silent film, the scorched clarity
of pantomimed emotions. My favorites
are the reenactors of alien abductions, probed
by almond-eyed greys, those who tussle with lake-
and swamp-monsters like Greek heroes, the ones
who shoot Bigfoot but mislay the body. Always
they are so beautiful—hometown harvest queens
and football legends told so often they were stars
that they believed it, and look where it got them,
murdered on a date with a psycho or fleeing
the Jersey Devil, lending sympathetic, wholesome
credibility to the graveled voiceovers of felons,
rednecks, and schizoids. I want to break
into their stories the way the angels do in the Bible
reenactments, appearing in the guise of an officer,
a Samaritan, a skillful exorcist. I would point out
the camera and rigs, smoothing their brows
as I tell them it’s ok, they don’t have to live
like this, there’s been some confusion: This is all
somebody else’s bad dream.