Sestina on Displacement I
[CW: Colonialism, Slavery, Climate Change]
Mar 18, 2026 · 3 min read
Why is the first move
on Google’s part to gurgle water
while their large language model gets lost
combing the internet? Watch those molecules flee
as I glaze over the AI summary and click on another
link to Merriam Webster’s dictionary. Do you
think I’ll just let myself and you
off the hook of making the first move
to find meaning? Maybe another
me would meander the depths of the water
pushing up in the algorithmic tub, let the meniscus of my inquiry flee
only to find another piece of me drifts until it’s lost.
Now that I’ve scraped through the lost
and found pile of definitions, it’s time to tell you
some sense of what the word means before you flee,
find your interest displaced in a sudden move
of the pages shut. The damp sigh of water
vapor escapes from your mouth—one breath after another
pools until it forms another
sea of moldy symbols explaining what I’ve already lost.
By the time I connect each pulse in the buzzing water
of my brain, I see you
pack up your bags and load up your U-Haul to move
your eyes for a poem where the words don’t flee
from significance. Well, fine, I promised I wouldn’t flee
anymore, didn’t I? But isn’t displacement just another
name for how the ships my Mother’s ancestors would move
would push manatees and crocs and whole ass humans, lost
until they had to find some other way to make us—you,
too, more than children of blood, cotton, sugar, bones in the water?
Is displacement not the imperceptible rise of the water
for each of my Father’s ancestors who chose to flee
into the blue pit of the Middle Passage? Do you
ignore the air we’ve shifted, even as another
hurricane rends a homes salvaged from chains into lost
people, who, now shackled to the atmosphere we shaped, move?
First through water, now by water, we shall move.
But care for where we flee, lest we find ourselves lost
in a bay far too cold for you and I; will there not form another?
This is baby's first exercise/attempt at a sestina. After working in this form, I'm craving a flash fiction where someone disinters Arnaut Daniel and gives him his comeuppance for conceiving of/popularizing such an unhinged form of verse, lmao. In any case, I’m hoping to get better with this form to incorporate a (hopefully better) sestina concerning this same term (displacement) into my collection. Anyway, for y’all who are big into writing poetry in certain forms, or those of y’all who haven’t heard of a sestina before, please consult with this glossary entry on the Academy of American Poets website. I’d love to see what y’all come up with!