Here's a collaborative sestina my creative writing class wrote with me. I started and finished it with a few lines and edited their work in the middle :)
A sestina is a very specific poetry form in which each verse has to end in the same 6 words, rotated in an order you have no control of. I wrote the first three lines, passed it around a circle for each person to add 3 more, then completed it with my last 6. It turned into a beautiful narrative!!!
sharing soap
My heart splits with a spark
as I see you’re one hour late.
I sit alone with coffee as the color
drains my face. The warm kiss
of peppermint washes me out like soap,
and it’s not the heat that burns.
Those first years, your eyes would burn
holes into my body; that drug, that spark
entombed with the lost moments of soap
operas watched late
at night, remembering our first kiss
and how the world was a new color.
But we never saw color
the same way. Blue fire burned
red to you, the same way our kisses
burned like our initial spark.
It was never too late
to cleanse ourselves with soap.
It’s the rose scented soap
that brings forth the brightest color
when it’s late.
Lye alone burns,
but with oil it sparkles,
hotter than a kiss.
And what better way to kiss
hello after years of sharing soap,
and groceries, than with the spark
that only a scrabble of colors
from a Crayola box can ignite and burn,
slowly and steadily, late
into the evening. Lights ignite the porch as you come home late—
the last kiss
before time starts to burn,
our love beginning to soap.
We wash our hands of dirty color,
again blank slates searching for a spark.
I bathe late at night, soap
kissing my skin like you used to, the color
of your red lips burned into my mind with a spark.
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