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Story background: I’m probably not the only person dealing with intrusive thoughts about everything I’ve ever said or done, or not said or not done, that I wish I could change. Sometimes I’ve wished I could shout at the past versions of myself.
This poem was written in response to the LandBack movement and as part of the brainstorming process for my unpublished cli-fi novel The Everwhen.
I was reading Genesis but I kept imagining everything happening where I grew up, in my childhood home. When I reached the part about Lot and his daughters, I became fixated on them. I never finished reading Genesis. This poem came out of that.
When I proposed to Caroline, I told her that as long as we lived I would deny her nothing, but I had one request for myself: that we fulfill my own lifelong dream and build a haunted mansion for us. Caroline was amenable to this.
I wrote this poem as a critique of certain political parties that espouse pro-life policies for “life” in the womb but won’t lift a finger to enact laws to help children once they’re actually born (anti-gun legislation, free healthcare and school lunches, etc.). They regard children as disposable fodder.
There’s an eye in the back of my husband’s head. It opens only after he’s fallen asleep, lid splitting silent as a dream in the night. My husband’s eyes are amber, no brighter than a penny in the sun. The eye on the back of his head is different. It looks out at me through his dark hair, pupil white and glowing.
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