I’ve never written a sestina, so I decided to do so. I didn’t double check the repetition pattern, which means this might be imperfect, but I don’t care.

I found the repeated words rather laborious until I started repeating the repeated words even more, so that they don’t just appear at the ends of the lines. I think this lends the piece the feeling of storytelling, giving the effect of someone repeating entire phrases for effect or repeating phrases because she is breathless and attempting to get the words out but unable to do so without stopping and starting.

All in all, I found the form too restrictive and clunky, but I did enjoy the process of writing this piece. I’m glad I gave it a whirl. I might come back and strip sections of it out for use in a free verse poem.

* * *

Air

Hold your breath, you say, and think of air.
All I need is the thought of it, slow-moving,
filling each chamber like light reaching deep
into a tunnel to touch each damp rock,
the way your hand pushes my skirt up slowly,
slowly. Don’t speak. Don’t say a word.

When you call me to you it is only one word
that rides on a small pocket of air
and lands on my chest like a rock.
What you want from me comes from deep
within my small aching body, slow-moving
and nearly inhuman in its attempt to get away. Slowly

slowly, I roll my hips back the way you like, slowly
let myself go slack as I hear you say the one word
I know you don’t mean, how it hangs in the air
with the weight and solidity of a rock
dropping from the wall of a cave. Deep
inside you are moving, moving,

moving me like a tree root moves the ground, moving
me slowly and incalculably, every molecule slowly
shifting to make way. Now without struggle. Now like a word,
with what’s behind it: all mouth, force and air.
You loosen your hold on my neck and land like a rock.
My breath comes back to my lungs, deep,

stale breath laden with fear, with deep —
shall I call it despair? (You would never find that moving.
You would say, Your voice is a waste of air.)
What can be captured by a word —
articulated and rolled in the mouth slowly,
the vowels and consonants hitting one another like rocks,

lips coming together then parting like a cleaved rock
to thrust out what can’t be held in. Deep
inside me there must be something you find moving
or you would not crawl onto me, clamp down slowly
like a machine made for this purpose, like a word
in desperate need of air.

Slowly, slowly, you roll away from me. Slowly
the mechanics of my body come back to me as I rock
back and forth, taking in air, taking in air.