Being a Woman

Pure revenge proves

hard to come by—

you have to take

so much into account!

Barely have you cursed

the thieves when you

wish their families

fed, because what do we

know of their story?

So I reserve it for

those who probably

couldn’t even fold

these origami boxes

I am stringing for

a friend but who

manage to balance

an assault rifle with

school children

in its sites. And when

in the middle of

matching the paper’s

edges and fitting

a made corner into

a made pocket and

and then breathing

a wish into the

small hole left

at the top so the

flat paper becomes

a box to hold

that wish—when

such thoughts interfere

at such a moment—

I reserve it for that.

---

Sestina Lock Down; To the Reader

Seeing the six stanzas and the coda fill the page

like a crowded room of relatives, you’re like, Damn! A sestina—

but it’s too late, now you’ve entered its rooms so you don’t stop

reading and the end words have begun introducing themselves, so

you make your way, resignedly, politely, looking for the door out

down at the end of the page, and travel the hallway of lines anyway

mixing courtesy with benefit of the doubt, hoping it will add up. Anyway

reader, where would you go, ha ha, but to another page

which could prove thornier—a poem of abstraction, vulgarity, or all-out

virtue signaling—and on the one hand you consider the sestina’s

longevity, its six-line stanzas moving through time, but even so

the verse can be as thick as a contortionist, without end stops

like this one, lines rolling on until the stubby short stop

of the end word lobs it back to the left margin. Well, any way

that you can love someone or some poem, the better, I say, so

enjoy the reading, safe with its six words circulating along the page

like cousins who make you laugh. And when the sestina

finally ends like a long museum visit, ideally, you might step out

into the 4pm light so full of sparkles you can just make out

the repetition of the impressionists’ vision, their special f-stop

setting, the colors repeating on the kids’ jackets; Tina

Turner’s cover, “I’ve never needed anybody’s help in any way”

streaming from a passing car, the soundtrack from an earlier page

of your own history, everything really, reworking itself. If you can sow

goodwill you can read a silk purse in a sow’s

ear. But it can go wrong. The way the news goes wrong. It turns out

that today another live shooter in a school took a page

from another live shooter in a school who took a page, and it’s not stop-

ing. Reader, now you might give up and say, “Anyway . . .”

as if the word “anyway” could bridge tragedy in a live sestina

and what seemed harmless at the beginning of the sestina—

it being too late once you enter the building like a student, busy reading, so

too late to find a safe hallway, a break in the pattern, any way

to make the revolving shootings add up to successful legislation, a way out

of a form where someone’s own childhood was so full of hurt they can’t stop

the pain, moving it to the next room, read stanza. Page-

ing higher intelligence: make it stop. Any way

possible. Gun lobbyists are so

out of control they page past the deaths and dread only sestinas.

---

Jessica Greenbaum’s most recent volume, Spilled and Gone, was named a Best Book by the Boston Globe. Her work appears in this year’s Best American Poetry and Pushcart anthologies and is forthcoming in A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker. She teaches on line and in person for different communities. https://poemsincommunity.org/