Amy Watkins & Jae Newman
We wrote this sestina together by email, each of us writing a line or two then tossing the poem back to the other for the next line or line fragment, back and forth like a poetic badminton game. We’re sure that Jae provided the title and Amy wrote the first line, but after that we’re not sure where one poet’s volley ends and the other’s begins.
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Reports from a Cocoon
So I folded in my silken wings and wrapped around
myself a second chrysalis. Maybe I was a butterfly,
a city without a single roof or trellis. Maybe I was
a girl with a raging fever or an old man with nothing
much to lose. To keep the sun out, I found a way
to delay my wings, to be a curtain of bleached lace
sucked against a screen like a hollow cheek. Placed
on this bough, every child wants to capture what’s round,
what leads him in circles netting the wind, wayward
as the leaf still stubbornly green in autumn, butterfly
bright and clinging. I knew the still comfort of nothing,
my oldest friend. Munching letters into leaves, I was
minding my own business when the rain spoke. I was
a leaf and all its thousand threaded spools of jade lace.
I knew green by all its names and must have known something
of yellow and blue, the forest floor and the sky’s round
belly. I know you’re asking, Who doesn’t want to be a butterfly?
But I’d already broken tradition, been limber, swayed
through the gossip of midnight blues until I was way
too far out to return, lost in the upper branches. Was
the light on my face the moon or its reflection, butterflied
on the surface of a raindrop? In that place
the distinction was minimal. I was surrounded
by mirrors, violent, and slashing leafy debris. Flying things
fall, no way around it. Call me coward; there’s nothing
you can say. Folded, I am an origami flower. What way
but down has there ever been? The cocoon grows around
the smallest twig, precarious, but that’s not what I was
trying to say. I meant to take it back, what I said about lace,
about trying to be nothing, an unassuming black fly
on the wall. I meant to say that courage is a flying
paper crane. I meant to say nothing but something
keeps rising in me, wings woven in antique lace.
Even in my cocoon I keep speaking, talking my way
out or asking, politely, in the smallest voice, who was
I to hover above these words, to dance around
and around like a child with a ribbon in her hand, to fly?
Shattering through the silk spun web, I am nothing,
no weight to keep me from fluttering, a stray, a bit of lace.
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Jae Newman and Amy Watkins grew up on opposite ends of the east coast, each the oldest of three siblings. Both married their high school sweethearts, became the parent of a little girl and graduated from Spalding University’s MFA in writing program where they became friends over a poem and a doughnut. They still live on opposite ends of the east coast with their respective sweethearts and girls and trade poems by email. Jae’s poems have recently appeared in Perihelion and Karamu, and Amy’s in Kestrel and LiteraryMama. Both were featured in the first issue of Ontologica.