Calling a world where gravity comes and goes "interesting" is the kind of understatement that makes the skin prickle. Sasha Fenn's "Quandary" opens in the voice of a calm observer, all lowercase and no fuss, then slips in the real news almost as an afterthought: "everyone is afraid." The poem never says what they are afraid of. It circles one idea instead, that fear can become a closed loop, feeding itself until nobody can say where it began. It leaves its speaker standing outside that loop, wondering.
The images are strange on purpose. Gravity is the thing we never think about because it never changes, but here it "can come and go," so even the ground becomes unreliable. The word also means seriousness or weight, and it is tempting to hear both: a world where nothing stays heavy enough to hold you down. Then the sun "lingers," a single word on its own line, as if the line were hanging around too. A sun that won't leave might sound comforting, but beside all that fear it feels stuck, a day that refuses to end. Light returns later in a darker form, when the fire is "dying / oe'r your dying coals."
The middle of the poem changes gear. Until now the verse has been loose and close to speech. Here it tightens into a chant, with rhyme landing on "soul," "whole," "goal" and "coals." The repeated "Show me" sounds like a plea or an invocation, and the vocabulary (soul, magic, purpose) is large and old-fashioned. The speaker is asking the "you" for proof of an inner life. Yet the pattern slips at the end. The third "Show me" becomes "Show the fire," with the "me" quietly dropped, as if the speaker has stopped making this personal. "Dying" is stranded on its own line, then repeated, and the archaic "oe'r" pulls the language into an older, almost ballad-like register. The "magic / keeping you whole" has dwindled to coals. A request to see a soul turns into watching one burn down.
When the refrain returns, it has changed. The first time, gravity "can come and go," a possibility. Now it "comes and goes," a fact. The repeated "It's a strange world" sounds like someone saying the same sentence over because nothing better will come. Then comes the poem's most knotted moment: "where all / fear you / fear all." The line breaks let it read several ways. Everyone fears you. You fear everyone. Or, wherever all fear, you fear all. The phrase is framed by the word "all," and its grammar wobbles like the gravity. Fear moves in both directions, and the person addressed is both the one feared and the one afraid.
The ending shifts the poem's whole position. "I wonder why / I wonder what it is / they know" gives us the poem's first "I" apart from the pleading "me," and its first "they." The speaker, apparently outside the circle of fear, suspects that others hold some knowledge that explains it. The last line has no punctuation and simply stops on "know." That word also closes a quiet pattern of sound, the long "o" running through "go," "show," "soul," "whole," "goal," "coals" and "goes." The sound the poem has been echoing all along finally lands on a question about knowledge. The title fits this ending, since a quandary is a state of not knowing what to do, and the word never appears in the text. The reader has to supply it.
The poem's strength is its restraint. There is no named villain, no event, only a mood and a few vivid images. That openness lets it be read as a poem about public anxiety, about a strained relationship, or about the unease of feeling you've missed something everyone else understands, and the text supports each reading without settling on one. What it captures is the shape of fear: it hangs over everything, travels in both directions, and leaves behind the suspicion that someone else holds the answer.