The 2021 New Voices Contest, 2nd Place Winner: Abandoned Sestina by A.D. Lauren-Abunassar
We’re all very excited to share with you the winners of the 2021 New Voices Contest, selected by Donika Kelly. Today, we have “Abandoned Sestina” by A.D. Lauren-Abunassar. Stay tuned for our winner S Kim’s poetry on the June 30th. You can find the 3rd place poem by Syd Westley here. Thank you to everyone who submitted this year!
“In ‘Abandoned Sestina,’ one glimpses the scaffolding of the sestina form, it’s closed and looping repetition, rippling through these prose stanzas. This formal dynamic mirrors the speaker’s dilemma, their desire to run away from or through a world broken.” — Donika Kelly
Abandoned Sestina
I’m trying to prove to God why I need a getaway car but it’s hard to quantify suffering to God without feeling like I’ll be punished for it. So, I suppose: getaway cars
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are the ghosts of everything I didn’t prove and God is a fear of punishment and punishment is an inability to number the things that need escaping: suffering, the Doomsday Clock in Union Square, God, punishment, my unbreakable heart and its many ways of, still, breaking.
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I’m trying to break the right way. The way God broke the ocean with footsteps. The way cars cut a darkness with headlights, slice the highway like ghosts in my apartment as soon as I turn the lights off. Trying to prove: things linger. Whether you can name them or not. The getting’s not always good in the getaway, more often than not: it’s suffering through the heart’s slow yearn for thread
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capable of sewing its split seams and missing light. I’m trying to prove to God that their punishment is redundant when I’m so good at punishing myself. The way I still lick envelopes. The way I continue to live in an apartment with cold sores. The way I drive in the dark without headlights, sometimes, when I feel like seeing a ghost.
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But often I’ve mistaken Jesus for God and I worry I’ll be punished for it. I.e. God never broke the water: God broke angels into humans and earth into oceans of ghosts and ghosts into the hearts of people who never learned to feel fear, to linger in fear, to notice that punishment is just another way of saying do better and doing better is just another way of getting in a car and driving home instead. Proof
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is antithetical to God. So I’ve been told. The way cars can’t be numbered on the highway without crashing into light. I’m trying not to crash into light. But I’m worried I’ll be punished for it. Because if I don’t crash into light, does that mean I have chosen the dark? I suppose dark is capable.
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Of lingering in the split seams of my apartment. Of lingering in the split seams of God? I suppose I’ll be punished for that. For saying God’s light can get away in a car and drive to Union Square to tamper with the Doomsday Clock. To say, here: let me split the time into oceans of do better. Let me feel fear like a human who has turned into an apartment filled with ghosts.
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Filled with thread that can’t bear its own tension, tension that can’t prove holding worth it. I am trying to be worth a getaway. I am trying to quantify the heart’s slow yearn for stasis, stasis which
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can only be found by driving the highway with lights trained on the windows of apartments filled with dark. Saying do better. Let something linger. Let God understand the lights off and the ghosts understand, through the cars, what it means to move on. I’m trying to move on. On into the split seams of my lingering. Lingering in the time spent missing the light.
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On the time spent trying to prove: I am not breaking. I am growing a space for a ghost’s God to name my slow yearn for home. My slow yearn for thread that can draw old fear to new stillness
A.D. Lauren-Abunassar
A.D. Lauren-Abunassar is an Arab-American writer who resides in New York. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Narrative, Cincinnati Review, Boulevard, Radar, and elsewhere. She was a 2020 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg finalist and the winner of the 2020 Palette Emerging Poet Contest. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
