Sestina on Displacement I

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!