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.

I wrote this to explore how we change in a relationship, how it isn’t always healthy or best for us—or necessarily consensual. We give pieces of ourselves away, we have pieces taken, we cut ourselves down to nothing in the name of love, and it is both a horror and a revelation.

I used to have this illustrated version of Beauty and the Beast when I was little, which more often than not I used to retrace the drawings than reread the story, but I do remember it was my favourite version of the tale because it reserved several beautiful pages for the scene with the rose theft.

I was inspired by my body, and bodies in general. What it means for a body to exist in spaces that find it unworthy, unholy. And how sometimes, we also have to carry our ancestry, our birthplace, in these very bodies. So we have bodies weighted with history and ancestry, but still found sacrilegious. How does one reconcile that?