A note about the work “War is always silent until it's done” from Ezza Ahmed for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Spring 2025 Issue: Warsan Shire has a brilliant poem called “War Poem” and in the second stanza there’s imagery of war giving birth to another war. With that sentiment in mind, I was looking at the exit strategies from the stories of my loved ones and that’s how this poem began to take shape. I have a fascination with looking at the things they packed with them, items they thought they could not live without or wouldn’t find anywhere else. I wanted to see what items they treated as “ingredients” for a fresh start. Though, what I found most interesting was that in all the accounts that were shared with me, what you want to exit from always weasels its way in.