A note about the poem “Exile” from Shahilla Shariff for the Michigan Quarterly Review’s Spring 2024 issue “African Writing: A Partial Cartography of Provocations”: An object from ordinary life—an unusual chocolate wrapper—was the aperture which transported me to my African childhood and to writing “Exile.” Rooted in memory, a series of seemingly disparate fragments were animated by unexpected encounters with songs, photographs, words and vistas. After countless iterations and experimentations, the images and ideas blurred and somehow assembled into a poem.