Regarding “Quickening,” Great Basin spadefoot toads have remarkable resilience to survive the harsh, dry, cold conditions of the Colorado Plateau. A year and a half into the pandemic, I remembered them—how they spend about seven months out of every year burrowed in dirt in a state of dormancy, absorbing scant water through their skin to survive. As is often the case, the first line of the poem was last to arrive.

Radha Marcum’s writing practice is rooted in ecological, social, and personal landscapes of the American West. Her poems appear widely in journals, and her first poetry collection, Bloodline, received the 2018 New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She lives in Colorado where she teaches at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop.

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