I chose to write this sestina because it was the most difficult form of poetry we discussed at the Girls Write Now Poetry workshop. I tapped into my desire for perfection. I realized through the writing process that perfection is impossible—but it is possible to love yourself.
Every day and every night, I wonder: I question everything.
I look deep within and I ask myself: am I perfect
in every way, shape, and form? Or, am I an imperfect
vision of what should not be, of cracked glass?
It’s like walking on a stony path, in a garden
full of dark velvet-petaled roses.
Have you ever held a creation so perfect, so unlike you? Roses
I once held in my small hands, and yet I felt like I had everything.
I felt no need to search, to wander through a garden
of other exotic flowers. For the small red roses I held in my small brown hands were perfect,
perfect like a broken mosaic put back together, like a sculpture of glass.
It may shatter one day, as all things do, but it will never be imperfect.
The bump in my nose is a hill that leads to the ravine full of breath: my lips, small and imperfect.
The shake in my hands, in my bones comes from the anxiety bubbling in my belly like an unfurling rose.
My eyes, framed with dark lashes, black like a shadow, reflect like glass
my restless and eternal soul. Within it are visions of my past lives, prophecies of my future lives—they are my wrongs, my rights, my everything.
If I look within, ignore the hurricane of thoughts, the drum beat of my heart, will I see a perfect
being? Will I feel as if I am an intricately beautiful painting in a museum, a rose in a garden?
I wish I could find within myself confidence and sureness, like a garden
growing with every tick of the clock, not a desolate tract of uncultivated land filled with imperfect
creations, of crumbling rocks. I do not want rocks—I want perfect.
I want a bouquet of blossoms, of fulfillment, of a warm feeling on a cold day, of roses
with petals soft like silk and an aroma like rain. Everything
disappoints me, makes me feel as if I have become melted glass
which gleams with treacherous truth, which hides shadows and reflects light—a glass
mask, thrown on in haste: an effort to show the world the garden
I have not yet grown. I am working hard to plant seeds, to plant small pieces of myself, of everything
good, of everything that is an imperfect
reflection, of scattered and sharp thorns like swords on the body of a rose.
What I am is flawed, yes, and what I am not is perfect.
If I were to look at myself, if I were to see a carefully constructed human like a house, perfect
in the slope of the roof, the curve of the door—I would be alive but trapped behind delicate glass.
I do not want the fragile idea of perfect painted on my body like a tattoo of an incomplete rose.
I want the expansiveness of a library to define me, the powerful knowledge of words on a page like flowers in the garden
of my mind, nourishing my network of neurons. You see, I am not imperfect,
the same way I am not perfect. I am, I am, I am: a cryptic collision of everything.
Yes, perfect I am not, but everything
else, I am. I am human and thus I am fragile and I am glass.
I am human and as I am full of life, I am imperfect.
And while I may not be a rose, I am a dandelion, a wishful vision of hope in a garden.