Category: Our Poetry

It was pretty fun although he kicked my ass.

I also saw this prompt about small spells to do on your birthday, and half of an enormous poem formed in my head while I was taking my 30 minutes of boredom based on the suggestion to write a letter to yourself a year ago even though it isn’t my birthday. So I’m going to post it here for posterity’s sake.

“annus epilepticus”

you don't know this yet
but the premonitions you've been having of
your own death are true
and a mere few weeks past your 28th birthday 
you will die - just enough - to touch the 
robe of any god you know 
when the subtle fire you've always been 
strikes you back 
and strikes you back again 

you will hang on for just long enough 
for your kind partner to burst into the room
cradle you in his arms 
and guide you, screaming in mortal terror, back into the light 

you have never been good at dying 
but this will take you a hair’s breadth from death
and you will bear the scars on your temporal lobe 
(and speech pattern) long afterwards to prove it

and whether it is by fate or some wild magic 
this will save your life in more ways than you will
know 

for most of July, you will not be able to speak
coherently. you will eventually choke out 
your suspicion that the seizures induced 
Wernicke's aphasia, and everyone who knows 
you will agree with you, a cruel fate for 
you, but more importantly, you will come back…
changed. 

you will start writing better poetry. something 
about the way your brain burned and cracked 
will allow you to see things from a different angle,
to look askance at language in a way you 
never did before. 
the partner that saved your life will convince you 
to start attending a poetry workshop held in a coffeeshop that july. the rhythm of writing and 
performing regularly amongst very talented 
wordsmiths will help break you out of your 
agoraphobia. 
one of them will take notice of the way you
perform, noting its similarity
to Shakespearean acting and encourage you to attend the open mic he runs. 
so you start performing at Linneman's Riverwest Inn again for the first time since 2023 at his 
personal request. 

you will somehow muddle through your divorce 
proceedings on july 23, five years and 13 days 
since leaving your ex husband, and it's a miracle 
you will be able to do that since even getting 
out of bed to use the bathroom still feels like running a marathon, but you're so hell-bound 
and determined to get rid of this man that 
when the judge asks if the marriage fell apart 
due to incompatibility of temperament, you will 
shout ABSOLUTELY loud and clear as day into
the microphone. (you will also show up hours 
early to the hearing. you don't want to miss this
for the world.) when your ex husband replies, it's the most defeated you will ever hear him. 
spite has always been your strong suit. 
the judge will finalize your divorce, and 
then the question arises of who you will
marry next. 

you will leave the answer up to the two people 
you consider yourself married to 
already, a man who cannot lie 
and a boy who cannot tell the truth. 
in a rare show of generosity, the liar boy
will concede to the honest man. 
he will live to regret that decision. you, however,
will not. 

as the months progress, it will become increasingly clear that despite your love 
for him, your relationship with the liar is built 
on sand. surviving your seizures will leave 
you with a new perspective on life and 
precious little patience for wasted time or 
undue stress, and the liar will waste your time
and mess with your head. 
you will tell him he is killing you. he displays no 
remorse. you will scream, beg, plead, and stop 
short of borrowing and stealing to get him to
listen. 
despite his damn near single-minded obsession 
with you that will make you feel like you're
emotionally his hostage, he will not care about
the affect he's having on your other relationships 
or your well being. 

one very early fall morning, after you've spent the 
entire night in the emergency room with him and 
your fiancé, “heat above” by greta van fleet will 
come on. your fiancé will remark that it feels as though you are driving into a different 
timeline as dawn breaks. you, spiritual and full of subtle fire as ever, will respond that you feel it, too. your liar will 
say nothing. 

finally, in november, after 
months of suspicion that he's cheating on you (despite being polyamorous!) 
he will get sloppy and you'll catch him when he
forgets to turn his location off. 
this is your red line and you will dump him over it. 
to add insult to injury, he will tell you you're 
overreacting. 
you will know better than that by now. 

despite your heartbreak, you will feel more 
free after leaving him than you have in months. 
you will compile a dossier of evidence against him
and publish it to the world. 
this is when the mask and gloves come off and it 
will spark
a months long battle of he-said-she said online. 
he will slander both you and your future husband. 
you will have even fewer regrets about leaving 
him. 

one of the final acts you will do before moving 
out from the apartment you and your fiancé share with your liar
is a manifestation ritual that will make you feel 
powerful beyond imagining - you will gaze into 
a mirror with your future husband while “heat above” plays in the background. you will picture yourself in red sunglasses driving down water street with more money and fame
 than sense, husband 
next to you. you pass your former lying flame on 
the street, roll down your window, wave to him like a queen, and ride on 
as if he had never meant a thing to you in the 
first place. 

you will choose “heat above” as the song for your
intentions for the year to come after how that ritual made you 
feel. 

on January 5th, you will feature at Linneman's, your poetic home. 
you will write a brilliant bespoke set for the 
occasion, combining music, poetry, and 
references to shakespeare at the 
host’s request. the audience is small, but they are
so engaged that they offer you a standing ovation at the end.
you have nothing prepared for an encore, so you
will offer them a story about your eccentric 
great uncle. 
it will go over the time limit, but not a soul will 
care. 

you will marry your husband on January 23rd in the 
same coffeeshop that helped you work through 
your agoraphobia. the wedding will be incredibly 
small, but it will be the finest wedding either of 
you have ever attended. the poet who runs 
the workshop that got you writing again will 
write a special poem for the ceremony. 
your friend and frequent collaborator will travel
all the way from Madison to attend. your 
husband's best man will travel all the way from
iowa. your “gentleman of debauchery”, as they are called, is your dear friend who you will 
date a few months later. 

you will wake up the next day in the fabulous 
hotel that your best man and 
a friend of yours who you met 
by chance arranged for you and your husband 
to find that one of the videos you posted from 
the wedding is going viral on instagram. 
it is your first look video, and no one, friend or foe, 
will quite know what to make of it. 
within days, it will amass millions of views.
you will keep posting. 

you will start to get inundated with direct messages from people who are fascinated with 
your body after you get an idea to post videos of
yourself in lingerie that your husband found 
for you at a clothing swap, and because you are
struggling financially, you will decide to start talking 
about your Patreon more. 
to no one’s surprise but your foes, you will get 
subscribers, enough to make hundreds of dollars 
in the first two months you talk about it. 
in the meantime, you will keep going viral. 

a few weeks before your next birthday, on 
your regularly scheduled Internet travels, 
you will come across a creator who found out 
that she copes with mast cell activation syndrome 
and that she has been taking H1 and H2 inhibitors 
for it. you will tell your husband what you saw, and seeing as you've already been taking H1 
inhibitors for some time, he will find you H2 inhibitors. 
you will take them as an experiment, and the 
difference is like night and day. you will feel as 
though you are emerging from a decade in a 
long, dark cave. 

the change will frighten you. 
you will keep going anyway. 

you don't know it yet, but despite everything - 
you will do more than your best this year. 

Allēna 6/5/2026