What is the most likely reason Rita dove chose to call this poem sonnet

The poem has fourteen lines.

Explanation:

Rita Dove is an African-American poet and her poetry is termed American “innovative” sonnet.  The African American sonnet is more of communication rather than a mere display of a poet's technical skills.  

For example:  In Rita Dove's Mother Love (1995), the sonnet is the primary element in the poet's combinatorial technique, emphasizing on the mother-daughter relation, calling upon the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone.  

The number fourteen (its half and its double), rather than meter or rhyme scheme, is here the principle that structures the volume's thirty-five poems into seven sections." The numbers 14, 7, and 28 are therefore more than just figures: they play metaphorically with womanhood as a totality that is split into two halves, daughter and mother, and then doubled into two adults as the daughter breaks loose from the mother to live her own life. This is the very theme of the classical myth Dove chooses to revisit, recast into a late twentieth-century drama of loss and regeneration.

Rita Dove is an African-American poet and her poetry is termed American “innovative” sonnet.  The African American sonnet is more of communication rather than a mere display of a poet's technical skills.  

For example:  In Rita Dove's Mother Love (1995), the sonnet is the primary element in the poet's combinatorial technique, emphasizing on the mother-daughter relation, calling upon the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone.  

The number fourteen (its half and its double), rather than meter or rhyme scheme, is here the principle that structures the volume's thirty-five poems into seven sections." The numbers 14, 7, and 28 are therefore more than just figures: they play metaphorically with womanhood as a totality that is split into two halves, daughter and mother, and then doubled into two adults as the daughter breaks loose from the mother to live her own life. This is the very theme of the classical myth Dove chooses to revisit, recast into a late twentieth-century drama of loss and regeneration.