This poem had been building for quite some time.
I’ve been volunteering with the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center since 2007; I’m a community education volunteer and a survivor speaker. In the former role, I’ve been doing a lot of work within my local community and the greater SF/F community regarding sexual violence. It’s been pretty nonstop. And by the nature of it, it worked its way into every aspect of my life – especially as I began to write a novel about childhood sexual abuse. And spent some time actually working at BARCC as well.
I began to fray. Vicarious trauma, they call it. It’s not uncommon. I kept pushing myself, but I got to a point where I had to take leave or snap, and I did take leave.
And the week I took leave, I wrote this poem.
Which has new meaning now that I’ve realized that I was in an abusive relationship at the time – a relationship that exploded into violence the week the poem was published.
“And the War is Never Over” was published in Strange Horizons in May 2013.