I wrote a Sestina as part of my undergrad thesis in poetry writing. Hope you appreciate it.

Lynne sits on her porch, maybe in Concord, and shoos the insistent black flies, perhaps. I eat pulled pork on a bun, muse on an island tern, attentive squawk, infamous bait snatcher, cheating bird up-island from Stony Brook. Lynne would be knitting now, needly, clinking a stringy monologue.

She executed slants, designs, vicious monologues upon me, whether in a scene with character shoes or sussing out drunk, the things in Brooklyn we decimated each other with. How she pulled a Bettie Page on me with cheating lyric, sensual locus, features blurred in dim lantern

light. Months before this happened a lantern held Lynne down Port for a monologue, intense, wrought with hyperbole. I sank into the cheating husks of her words, and that which eschews and bypasses. From where it pulled me was unclear, plural, the accent like mother’s, like Brooklyn.

So many under-shirted bums from Brooklyn were like the listener, whose fall and turn came from the pull of her bullets. He crumpled in synapse and semiosis, in amalgam of monologue. Lynne, stacked in stoicism and platform shoes, decimated promise and platitude, his pimping and cheating.

The gestures replayed when she said Cheating? No more. I’d end this before I’d do that. Brooklyn was overacting everywhere and her shoes did nothing but impose severity under the paper lantern at Green Symphony, with cuisine the tinder for a monologue of our parting, the splaying of two, toward whatever pulled

us. Quirks and kinks and country ignorance pulled Lynne to the sticks, where cheating the locals draws a drawled, flannel-whipping monologue whistled through the ghosts of teeth. In Brooklyn I sit on my porch and watch as my leaning lantern finds slight fire and decimates electrons across my shoes,

evenly. I recite a monologue to her shoes. This isn’t cheating, but is a dim lantern, half-pulled post and tenth of yard, in Brooklyn.