A note about the poem “on hunger” from Diya Abbas for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Winter 2025 Issue: Chiasmus is the grammatical technique of inversion. This poem uses chiasmus, or concatenation, to create entrapment for the speaker, the subject, and the reader. I wrote this poem because I was frustrated with time. I hoped this technique would build a contamination of belief where sound, the repetition of words and their meanings, could weave the unknown and known. Truth or what Louise Glück calls “embodied vision” is most often found first in the excavation of sound: In the aural knots of the image. Each ligature of the line breaks builds an unbreakable machine of the poem. I want my poems to be concerned with the illumination of vision that makes alternative forms of time possible including the very form of our lives. What poetry offers us is the chance to practice embodied inquiry with intensity and intention. I hope that this poem, through presence, can dance with dignity through form to confront the dilemma of time.