Poem Notes for "Dodging the Bullet"

[cafenowhere]

I posted this on my Patreon last month, and now that it's available to read for everyone, I thought I'd post it here too. 

CW for brief mention, near the end, of long-past suicidality

 

Last week my ageing werewolf poem “Dodging the Bullet” appeared at Small Wonders. This poem is a companion piece to “Through the Keyhole”, which appeared in the Nov/Dec 2023 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

“Through the Keyhole” is the more traditional werewolf poem, focusing on the body horror of transformation, with the modern twist that, with mighty effort, one can control the transformation back to human so that one’s body better suits one’s identity. “Dodging the Bullet” challenges the mythos of the angsty werewolf doomed to a tragic death. I wrote it thinking about people who were convinced they’d die young, but then did not. These people live with such gratitude and sweet surprise, savoring milestones they never expected to see. I wanted to capture their sense of wonder.

Both poems have their genesis in a trip to Denver for the Sirens Conference (may it soon return!). I wrote “Through the Keyhole” while waiting in the Denver airport for my ride to the hotel. I drafted “Dodging the Bullet” at the hotel bar that night. I ended up scrapping most of my notes for it, substantially revising it when I got home, but the core idea was there. I don’t know why I had werewolves on the brain at the time. These poems are completely unrelated to the werewolf novel I wrote many years ago. I was listening to the audiobook Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness by Peter Godfrey-Smith at the time. So maybe I was thinking about the lockstep of evolution and how to pry from it a modicum of self-actualization, how we can deviate from programming and write our own endings.

The phrase “to see two human looks away” is something I’ve been carrying around for over 20 years, since I first researched my werewolf novel. Unfortunately, I can’t find the index cards I used for that research, so I don’t know the provenance. I think the saying may have been attributed to Native Americans, but folks have been known to put their words into other people’s mouths to sound wise, so that’s not helpful. I don’t know if wolves can actually see twice as far as humans. They have a wider field of vision and can see more on the horizon without moving their heads. They can also detect more shades of gray than humans can. Consensus seems to be that wolves can see faster than us, if not farther. But I’d been holding onto “two human looks away” for decades, so I was damn well going to use it.

“Dodging the Bullet” may be my version of “Sometimes” by Sheenagh Pugh, a poem that acknowledges, “Hey, maybe things aren’t always terrible, maybe sometimes it all works out.” For me, realizing how often things go right is a privilege of ageing. In youth I could be callow and pessimistic, maybe because I didn’t really believe I was destructible, no matter how harsh the universe or suicidal my ideation. But the longer I live this fragile life, the more I see, far more often than seems statistically likely, the happy endings. As Pugh writes, “may it happen for you.”

Comments

[asakiyume]

I wrote it thinking about people who were convinced they’d die young, but then did not. These people live with such gratitude and sweet surprise, savoring milestones they never expected to see. I wanted to capture their sense of wonder. --That's beautiful.

[cafenowhere]

Thank you. It's funny, the soup of connections one has to make to bring a poem into being.