“Like most folks, I’ve spent a lot of time in a car getting myself to and from work. In any journey, there’s an ecstasy to the pain of transition. When I was a full-time teacher I lived on this edge—I’d be driving toward my students, whom I hoped to assist in wielding the tools of language, metaphor, expression—and yet I knew, on some level, how useless my attempts might be, were, when stacked against the very real facts of their lives. We move in and out of our beliefs and those beliefs hold us to some sort of vision; to love and yet know your love has holes. Some days I feel this acutely, and I wrote this poem on one such day.”
—Emily Kendal Frey