Look, somehow I reverse-psychologised myself into writing a sestina. My poet-pals have spent so long talking about how it’s a tremendous waste of time attempting to craft even a passable one. The form succumbs easily to long-winded repetitiveness, and so produces poems mainly for readers who are also die-hard poets – meaning the target audience is likely to spy the hack job required to wring the last few stanzas out of the structure. High risk, low reward. In the spirit of the silly season (having hammered this poem out on Christmas Eve over a couple of milk stouts) I present: a sestina about poetry and also the moon. What could go wrong? I’m distractable yet deadline-oriented, so rely on opportunities to perform or publish as motive to write. I like serving up fresh kills for the table, letting everyone know it was only hours ago I was still stalking the woods in pursuit of today’s catch. Often this means the poems are clumsily butchered, and haven’t had time to cure properly… but like a proud kitten I present my mangled trophy. I don’t know why I’m speaking in deathly reference to this act of creation though. Perhaps it shows the adversarial character of the sestina. A workout for tricksiness that invites the poet to fold and cheat (which, for the pedants, of course I did). Aren’t poets supposed to be obsessive puzzlers? Actually, I had a bit in the draft about a time at Ella Borrie’s place when a bunch of the poets got captivated completing a puzzle of a moon goddess haloed with wolves and purple fractals–like the Seinfeld episode where all the chief executives are mesmerised by magic eye tricks. Milady of the Jigsaw didn’t make it in, but these same friends have an ongoing joke about the moon being all our wife–a harmless claim for hapless yearners that I’ve been wanting to riff on for a while. I was drawn to the sestina form because Nick Ascroft held a couple of Glottis revival gigs last year, with accompanying zines, for which Anna Jackson wrote a pair of mind-blowing sestinas propelled by migraine meds, braless canoeing, gentrification, and volcanoes. Gorgeous pieces. A matching set of masterworks that reinstated the surprising possibility of fixed-form constraint. Instead you have to bear with mine, haha, gotcha! It’s unusual for me to refer so explicitly to the other poets who have shaped a piece, or name them people as characters in my poems. I used to wince when writers namedropped notable mates in their work. Nepo baby discourse. Now I’m like, wow I love my friends (uwu) so why shouldn’t I immortalise them in forgettable word salad? Why not name those whose companionship elevates my life, especially when my work would go nowhere without being in conversation with theirs? So this element of the poem has been an experiment too, placing others in the poem’s funhouse mirror. Writing into this form, I enjoyed the invitation to discursiveness, as well as recursive loops back to narrative braids anchored in the end-words. That said, if there’s enough material on a theme to justify an entire sestina, maybe it’s better off as a lyric essay… Particularly when gesturing at autobiography. I had to bend truth to fit the lines on my A4 docx page, warping the funhouse mirror further. Everyone really did go hard on the negroni sbagliatos in homage to the flirty thespians in that House of the Dragon TikTok, but I am not in the habit of puking after professional events. But the sestina making claims it has no right to fits the charm of the form–gaudy, playful, ambitious. Festive even! Meri Kirihimete to all, and to all a good night x

rebecca hawkes