Janice Gould (1949-2019) was a Koyangk'auwi Maidu scholar and poet from Berkeley, California. “Six Sonnets” was published in the second half of her 2011 poetry collection Doubters and Dreamers, where she explores her lesbianism. This was my first time meeting Janice Gould on the page, but I immediately fell in love with her work. This poem in particular stuns me for many reasons. I love the reimagination of the sonnet form here, and Gould plays a lot with sonnets throughout the collection. Gould takes us on a road trip through these six sonnets. In order to create a similar sense of movement, I wanted to integrate the themes of the poem into one dark line representing the lover’s hair, the road, and the river. Gould is explicit about the concrete joy and sensory pleasures of being with a loved one, yet speaks more cryptically of creeping doubt and anxieties. I wanted to focus on the light through the sky and the landscape, without ignoring the everpresent darkness. There is no light without the dark. Despite the anxiety about what lurks in the shadows, I did not want to play into the narrative that darkness is scary. The title of the poem is taken from the fourth sonnet, which I took to mean that ancestors are all around and below us, in the dark places. Gould’s poem is in some ways a love letter to the landscape- another reminder of the way Native lesbian poets synonymize Indigeneity, sapphism, and the land. In my Native lesbian family tree, Janice Gould feels like a cousin, in the way that it seems everyone is each other’s cousin on the rez. You don’t know exactly how you’re related, but she tells you that she bought your aunt her first beer and she was there when you were born.