Hello, I'm a sestina.
God, I hate form poems. It makes drafting a thousand times more complicated. I'm not crazy about this poem but I need a place to put it so I can print it out for class tomorrow and it took me DAYS to write correctly. So, there.
“French Kiss”
One quick touch of lips on one cheek and then the other side
as if love has nothing to do with it. In French,
you learn the word love before like because
it’s easier. When I was sixteen, I wondered
if Edith Piaf had seen the irony that in life, love
never came first and if it did, it was never easy.
When I was real young I thought it was easy
enough to find one. Like romance novels stacked side
by side, boys were a dime a dozen. My mother said Love,
take your time in her best French
accent and I wondered
if she knew something I didn’t because
she sighed as I asked her when and why. Because,
my mother told me, women who fell in love were called easy.
I took my first sip of cafe au lait and wondered
if coffee would always taste this bitter or if my side
of things was skewed because it seemed so much sweeter in French
films where in black in white cafes the soft sips tasted like love.
By twenty-three, I had stopped believing in love
as a verb that could translate in my life because
I had fashioned myself into a woman who french
kissed men she hardly knew because it was easier
than being the woman on the side
lines, easier than wondering,
sitting home alone and wondering
if any of them really loved
the girl behind the coffee mug or if she was just a side
dish in the bland bistros of their lives because
within a day’s time her taste had faded. Easy,
I said to myself, except I said it in French,
in my awkward resurrected high school French and I wondered
when it would ever come easy, when love
would be a present tense because it was on my side.
“French Kiss”
One quick touch of lips on one cheek and then the other side
as if love has nothing to do with it. In French,
you learn the word love before like because
it’s easier. When I was sixteen, I wondered
if Edith Piaf had seen the irony that in life, love
never came first and if it did, it was never easy.
When I was real young I thought it was easy
enough to find one. Like romance novels stacked side
by side, boys were a dime a dozen. My mother said Love,
take your time in her best French
accent and I wondered
if she knew something I didn’t because
she sighed as I asked her when and why. Because,
my mother told me, women who fell in love were called easy.
I took my first sip of cafe au lait and wondered
if coffee would always taste this bitter or if my side
of things was skewed because it seemed so much sweeter in French
films where in black in white cafes the soft sips tasted like love.
By twenty-three, I had stopped believing in love
as a verb that could translate in my life because
I had fashioned myself into a woman who french
kissed men she hardly knew because it was easier
than being the woman on the side
lines, easier than wondering,
sitting home alone and wondering
if any of them really loved
the girl behind the coffee mug or if she was just a side
dish in the bland bistros of their lives because
within a day’s time her taste had faded. Easy,
I said to myself, except I said it in French,
in my awkward resurrected high school French and I wondered
when it would ever come easy, when love
would be a present tense because it was on my side.