Author Update #12

Just in time for Halloween, a mystery:

I tend to list all of my submissions on Duotrope to make sure I keep track of what I’ve sent and when. However, as I combed through my still pending submissions, I could find no record in my email or elsewhere that I had submitted to Hecate Magazine (defunct) though I had placed it on my submission tracker. I figured I had forgotten to submit, but still put it on my tracker. Once I realized I could find no record of submission, I deleted the listing and moved on. Two days later, I receive an email from Hecate requesting copyediting for my upcoming piece. I wondered if it was sent in error, but the EIC confirmed that it was accepted, and had problems with emails not being received. This publication from Hecate Magazine for my poem, “Condemnation”, is a Halloween surprise! Get the anthology here.

Now, about the poem:

It is and is not a poem of a demon possession. The poem is heavily related to a short story I’ve written called “Dagaz” (unpublished). The title of that story is runic for “D”, with the meaning of “Daybreak”, as in renewal or change. In that story, my character, a powerful witch, faces an internal battle to exorcise a demon from herself. There, the demon uses words and phrases that trigger me, intentionally. These words and phrases are things yelled, said, or lied to me; they are words that form my self-doubt and self-criticism. PTSD can feel like demonic possession, when recalling triggers can melt away my current life into the sensations of those horrors in my past.

The title of this poem, “Condemnation”, refers to the recurrence of being brought back, upon the wings of a demon, to these memories. I still hunch my shoulders against loud noises or depictions of violence; even my body remembers the abuse. My trauma-related anxiety causes me to have a lot of sleeping disturbances, including insomnia and RLS, and the tension I carry gives me extremely painful backaches. Sometimes, it feels like I am being torn apart from the inside. The everlasting torment of the nightmares I’ve lived, the very real pain I carry, is like being possessed. Sometimes, I withdraw from friends, or have to leave a class, or shut down entirely. That sounds very similar to possession, doesn’t it? So yes, it is a poem of demonic possession: I am possessed by the demons in my past, and I have to spend every day fighting them.