" What is it like to be an astronaut of incarceration? It’s stomped wings and a choked heart. The sound of my mom’s screams in that Pennsylvania courtroom made me deaf, like I was actually being pushed beyond and into the stratosphere. She swallowed all of sound into her pain. I saw my dad poured out of himself, shriveled, his breath hijacked, trying to be a pillar to my mom, as he crumpled. "

― Junauda Petrus , The Stars and the Blackness Between Them