Struggling with lifelong mental health issues means I’ve heard a lot of suggestions from folks who seem to think I’ve overlooked any number of simple remedies. It often reminds me of the confidence on display when, while watching a horror movie, some viewers are just so certain that they would make smarter, quicker, braver decisions than the characters on screen. How calm and bold and logical they would be while surviving the deadly threats. 

I spent much of my early life in a tiny community on California’s distant North Coast. Isolation breeds secrets; the peaceful dark of an old-growth redwood forest provides easy cover for violence, and speaking out carries devastating social consequences—especially for women and girls. I wondered: what if their whispers grew teeth?

The imagery is from time spent in the woods, including in an area here with 14,000-year-old glacial soil deposits—how special is that, people clean up your garbage. Back then it would’ve been predominantly oak trees, but we now see a lot more maple, as well as other introduced species. The fireflies . . . the species here overwinter in the soil.

Recently, it’s been hard not to feel consumed by outside forces. There’s always someone coming to take something from you. The taxman, the debt collector, familial relations, whomever. This poem is for those who have given everything.

I wrote this poem in response to a distant loss, but as with all complex loss, the aftershocks linger. I wanted to explore the imagery and symbols of memory, how reminders live inside fleeting moments, small objects, or arrive with a snarl as bigger beasts—and even after years, there are these reverberations, quiet hauntings, a sort of ebb and flow of recollection.

I first began writing these journal entries to hide a secret inside of them. Jadeera, a character in my novel Within Sight, was confronted with this unsolvable mystery. Giant sea monsters started washing ashore with strange markings on their bellies—some dead, others half-dead and furious, wreaking havoc on her village. I created an artifact, the leather-bound leaflet in which these entries are penned.

My friend, artist John Gallagher, posted a collection of art pieces on social media. And I saw one that had two figures in shrouds, with smoke swirling around them, in a desolate place. It was such a mood—albeit one of predation and despair—and I immediately exclaimed I needed to write something inspired by that. So, I did.

This poem was inspired by folklore about devils and stories I’ve heard about The Devil visiting various communities. I used mistranslations of different cryptid lore and paired it with English and Mi’kmaw language—as Mi’kmaq is a verb-based language, it’s interesting to me to bring it into a genre where objects and subjects are alive and, sometimes, supernaturally alive.

I wrote this poem in a quarantine October; I wish the year that followed had made it a period piece. The title comes from the refrain of the “Lyke Wake Dirge,” which I learned as a child from the singing of Buffy Sainte-Marie and which has threaded through my own work ever since. Years after the fact, I discovered she was singing a variation on the classical arrangement by Benjamin Britten, but as much as I admire the eerie lilt of Peter Pears’ famously dry white tenor, less like the living waking the dead than one ghost calling another down, the old sistrum jangle behind Sainte-Marie terrified me.