Sestina Playbook Saturday with Jules Nyquist & Sandy Yannone
Join sestina troubadours Jules Nyquist and Sandy Yannone for a special dual-taught day workshop on the sestina! Sandy is on her Glass Studio book tour and is our special guest for a once-in-a-lifetime, in-person sestina workshop. Let’s have fun and play with the magic of the sestina. We will read sestinas, use some writing exercises out of the Sestina Playbook and create at least one new sestina of your own. Walk the labyrinth in the backyard of Jules’ Poetry Playhouse for inspiration.
Saturday, June 29th
11 am - 3 pm
at Jules’ Poetry Playhouse
11 Homestead Lane, Placitas, NM
$65 includes all handouts and snacks
Books available for purchase at event
The labyrinth at Jules’ Poetry Playhouse
Summer Morning Sestina
Sandra Yannone
The breeze sifts through the tattered screen
as does the punctuating cackles of roosters. My hands
cover my ears to shield them from the shrew’s
call and response. Everything seems dressed
in feathers at this moment of building
something not quite loaded
in my mind. The sky is loading
up the sun for another day of sunscreen
needed. I continue to build
upon the peace I can press between my hands.
Others I know bear dressings
wound around their wrists, shrewd
gauze reminders of their shrewder
desires to off load
their lives into a better dressed
version of now like stars on the big screens
decked out in taffeta and tuxedos, gloved hands,
and jewels. The imagination keeps building
castles in the air. The buildings
stare down from the clouds. Shrews
think about migrating there, but eventually hand
in their notices to vacate for less loaded
climates in winter, needing to screen
out the blusters of snow that dress
the northern skies. Changes of address
await us all as we build
our lives, trying to screen
out death at every wild turn. It’s a shrewd
existence to feel so front loaded
with the knowledge that our hands
one day will not move like hands,
that someone will have to dress
us in our best and unload
us to the earth or water or whatever building
we choose to inhabit in our shrewd
next wild life. The morning still screens
the breeze. I am building my day to unload
whatever it is that I can’t hand over to the dress
rehearsal that my life simply can’t screen.
Jules Nyquist
when zero
is a temperature
it is an interval scale
that dips below an imaginary
line to go negative, as in a thermometer
in a pandemic used as permission to measure
our temperature, but how do we measure
something that falls below zero
like the weight of a bird—our thermometer
won’t register an invisible temperature
and we will disappear like the imaginary
checkbook balance of youth, on a scale
of probability, the chances of converting the Fahrenheit scale
to Centigrade was remote, the U.S. still measured
in Fahrenheit behind the rest of the imaginary
world where a bank balance waits to zero-
out and a raven pulls shiny coins from the sky in a temperature-
controlled out-of-the ether mainframe thermometer
six thousand feet above sea level, a thermometer
measures the speed on a speedometer scale
when the motorcycle driver hurls over a temperature-
reduced mountain ridge to an almost measurable
crash that soars into a stock-market zero-
point of ratio scaling, a lie on an imaginary
boundary where the motorcycle driver imagines
they never hit the car and the thermometer
never registered above human normal and zero
meant nothing, it was only an innocent bathroom scale
that we blamed added ten immeasurable
pandemic pounds to our weight and the temperature
of Earth rose only in the height of trees, a temperature
that didn’t take into account the imaginary
altitude sickness that turned out to be very measurable
and tripled the effect of the beer stored in a thermal
cooler, found by the side of the scaled
curve of that mountain road where zero
was just a measurement of temperature
and the imaginary paper bank statement never showed zero
due to there was nothing to scale on the erratic thermometer.
1Jules Nyquist is the founder of Jules’ Poetry Playhouse, a place for poetry and play.
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics Volume 12 Number 2 (July 2022)