“I wrote this poem in my head on my way to work last year in my sports-car that I love driving, a snowy late-January drive toward the mountains, pandemic looming, impeachment trial pending, climate disaster accelerating, and a feeling of complicity and powerlessness decided to capture itself in language, in recognition, as a challenge to stop—to choose differently. Tiny words I should probably have tightened or complicated force a slowdown. The form is sonnet-length but isn’t a sonnet. Jagged tercets take up most of the poem, but the last two lines are a nearly-even couplet: an effort toward evenness, interrupting a chaos pattern masquerading as traditional or recognizable order.”
—Khadijah Queen