And yet, as popular as the zombie look is, many women are still intimidated by the amount of time and money it takes to adopt a properly putrefied pose. Sure, some women spend hours at the beauty salon having their hair strandardized, but you don’t have to. You can get the same coveted straggly chic style without leaving your own bathroom, and you don’t have to lose a single strand to do it!

Here, tips for becoming your own homegrown beautiful corpse.

The eyes have it. Central to the zombie trend is the red webbing in a wanna-z’s eyes. BloodTacts—bloodshot contact lenses—can cost up to $100 per pair, depending on the intracacy of the lines. You can attain the same effect at a fraction of the cost with a helpful little product that’s probably already in your purse: pepper spray. A tiny shot of pepper spray will turn your eyes bright pink for hours. Apply carefully. Excessive application can result in burning, stinging and temporary blindness.

Neither hair nor there The stringy gray strands of straggly chic might be all the rage but don’t be so quick to surrender your tresses to strand-thinning mavens at the local salon. Rates of regrowth vary, and many women report dissatisfaction with the appearance of their scalp. Instead of heading to the salon, head to your pantry. Douse your head with olive oil; on days when you  need a little extra conditioning, go  extra virgin. Once hair is seriously soaked, sprinkle with all-purpose flour. (Use 3 tablespoons whole wheat for a super-grime look.) Clump hair together in bunches about a quarter inch thick, taking care to keep them separate, and you are ready to go. Not sure what to do with the excess oil sliding down your forehead? Take along a brightly colored statement handkerchief and keep the drips at bay in style!

Clothing in on it. The best haute-decay designs are those that leave the tailoring to Mother Nature. All too frequently, torn and ripped clothes can look calculatingly damaged. Replicate the replication of the natural world by staking your favorite outfits to a tree for several weeks. Then run them through the dishwasher with boric acid. In no time at all, your beloved 7s will look like they’ve been dragged around by a rotted corpse for ten years. Beautiful!

Making scents. Fifty percent of wanna-z success is aural. If you smell like a zombie, then you look like a zombie. To be on trend without making your gag reflex kick in, buy Eau de Death at any drugstore or pharmacy and sweeten it at home with this easy concoction: 2 tablespoons cream soda, 1 tablespoon vanilla, 1 teaspoon confectioners’ sugar, 1 cherry Jolly Rancher dissolved in 2 ounces hot water. Mix with your perfume of choice and voilà—sweets for the sweet!

Titled “The Elephant Escapes From the Cube House and the Masses Worship It.”

Emily Dickinson
There is another sky,
And I sat on its clouds, whispering poetry into its ears.
Verses that hissed like a breeze in the trees of summer,
Like snakes in the closets of sharp-dressed and reasonable men.
While whispering sweet hisses, they waited and hid,
Biting and growling like ravenous kids.
One rotten apple intent on spoiling the barrel
Ain’t gonna succeed–not just yet. There will always be more.
Obstacles cut down like so many frayed blades of grass;
A lawn mower with no rhyme or reason.

William Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a cloud,
Dewey mist floating upward then down,
Growing teeth that couldn’t bite
Any harder than a mother black bear.
Scratches and tears at the door,
Like ghost-cats from your past
Meowing and playing with your future like yarn,
Tugging the cosmic strings until it all unravels
Into cat’s toys for the cosmos; the shapeless tangles, loose, unsure.
Infinite feline ball of timey wire.

William Yeats
I whispered, “I am too young.”
She whispered back, “Who cares?”
She waited, frowning and grudging,
Grudging like an old man
Irate with bicycle tracks across his lush grass.
He stands, bat in hand–”I’m gonna kick your–” and thinks, this is stupid.
“I could be enjoying sweet-cakes or pie; not fighting.”
And so I said, “Eh, why not?”
You laughed. You were always laughing.
Guess who’s laughing now?

William Blake
I was angry with my friend;
She was perpetually up in my grill.
She crackled, and sizzled, and started to smell.
That ol’ brown bear we roasted there
Tasted like moss and mildew
And the soft morning sun in a weary traveler’s eyes.
There–the tentative and frayed horizon; light folded but not that tidy.
Tentacled beyond sight waiting for spring morning,
Like Cuthulu’s pet bird
Soaring through the mouth of the river Styx.

For the longer writing, Morgan read a couple passages from Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Dr. Kavorkian, which resulted in an alarmingly death-themed collection of writings. To lighten the feeling, the group poem focused on Adulthood, or the lack thereof.

Adulthood (or the lack thereof)
My dog ate my diploma doesn’t quite work as well.
The Disney channel is way better than CNN.
Adult? I only got as far as A for aaaaAAaaaAAAaaaa…..
Every year on this bus is another stop farther from school.
Well, I guess there’s always telling people you’ll apply to grad school.
Who needs a job when you have cookies?
Now I’m just waiting to arrive somewhere that isn’t a real place.
What else is there to look forward to besides dementia’s new childhood?

Enjoy your summers, and happy writing!