What is storytelling if not our duty to necromancy? Our duty to bring life to ashes? This poem was largely inspired by society’s response to The Dancing Plague of 1518, a notable instance of the virus-like phenomenon of people frantically dancing themselves to collapse and even death. To this day, no one knows what caused these outbreaks, yet, centuries later, its nebulous and horrific occurrence continues to call scholars and artists to reanimate history into a mirror of the present.

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.