Oh. There Is No Going Back

 by Bacopa Literary Review 2021 poetry contributor Megan Wildhood

"Oh. There Is No Going Back" came to me in an instant, nearly whole, on the day in April 2021 when I realized that we as a society are never going back to normal. I had long since stopped wiping down every screen and surface with hydrogen peroxide and I wasn't washing my hands raw every 12 hours anymore like I had the previous year, but I had truly thought that the end of this would at least be in view by the second Easter after the dawn of COVID.

It was starting to happen anyway, but the pandemic turbo-charged the demolition of my self-concept politically, which has ended up rewriting everything else about who I thought I was up until the advent of the pandemic era. 

On that unusually clear day, Oh. There Is No Going Back came to me in almost the exact way it was published. I felt my relationship to the future change. It was bigger than no longer being able to walk people up to the gate at the airport. So much was being disfigured about current life and the future.

Too much.

And I hadn't seen it. Until the day Oh. There Is No Going Back came to me. I had still been trusting that there was.

*     *     *

Megan Wildhood is an erinacious, neurodiverse lady writer in Seattle who helps her readers feel genuinely seen as they interact with her dispatches from the junction of extractive economics, mental and emotional distress, disability, and reparative justice. She hopes you will find yourself in her words as well as The Atlantic, Yes! Magazine, Mad in America, The Sun, and elsewhere.

Read Megan Wildhood's "Oh. There Is No Going Back" (p. 1) and other compelling

Poetry, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Prose Poetry
in Bacopa Literary Review 2021