I’d originally planned on writing a nightmarish short story, but it turned out better as a poem. It also became a way for me to explore grief and the loss of a loved one while attempting to deliver a more surreal and cinematic reading experience overall.

As someone who has had many family members lose their memory to disease, I wanted to write a poem where there isn’t exactly hope, but at least autonomy in memory loss—that instead of walking down a dimming path where you eventually lose your way home, it could be more like an act of burning your own memories to light the way to a different future.

“Sumbisori” refers to the peculiar exhale of the haenyeo-women divers in the Jeju Province of South Korea. When they surface, they let their breath out as a whistling sound that has always struck me as both a little eerie and a little lonely.

Weirdly, I really did pretend juice from fruit canned by my mom was spoonfuls of delicious cough syrup, and one day in elementary school, I really did earn a punch in the arm from choking and coughing juice all over my friends in the cafeteria. From that seed, I branched off over many revisions of this poem to include my fears.

This poem sprang from its title, a product of old-school random-generator email spam. I suspect it meant the Anunnaki in their pseudo-scientific incarnations, but I thought of the chthonic demon-deities of the Akkadian underworld.

This poem began as a letter from a grandmother to her grandchild. It warns of uncontrollable wickedness and gifts them wisdom for how to survive despite it.