Cassandra de Alba

BROKEN SESTINA FOR MARY BELL

1968

It's my second month at Redgate, and my hands
have started shaking. A young offenders' home
intended for boys
isn’t a place with many mirrors
so it could’ve begun somewhere else, my face
growing into an unreflected stranger, a girl

whose lips wouldn't part if I smiled. I
spend a lot of time sitting on my hands,
staring at the side of the psychiatrist’s face.
He asks about my mother, about home,
about guilt and consequences and those two boys.
I ask to see a mirror.

He chuckles, says there are no mirrors,
rewords another question. I'm the only girl
in this overflowing building of messed-up boys
and they know: what I've done with my hands,
why I'm here. I don't talk to them, don't call this home.
Without looking, I can tell: I wear my crime all over my face.

1998

When the TVs once again evening-news my face,
it is nothing like looking in a mirror.
The vans crowd around our house,
a swarm of pointing fingers. My daughter
is doing her math homework, hands
busy with geometry, half-dreaming about some boy.

My knees give out as the reporter
from Channel Five yells my name, my real name, face
hidden by a megaphone. My daughter's hands
stop moving and she looks at me, a mirror
of confusion. I am not a name to scare girls
with, not tabloid fodder—I am her mother. This is home.

The police smuggle us under blankets out of our house.
She stares wide-eyed at the boys
crowding the sidewalk, the girls
so eager for a glimpse of my face.
I watch them in the cop car's rearview mirror.
I take my daughter's hands.

I say, When I was a girl I didn't have a home.
My hands sought out the necks of little boys.
A dead child’s face was like looking in a mirror.


Cassandra reads "Broken Sestina for Mary Bell":



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Cassandra confesses: "I'm fascinated by the story of Mary Bell, who killed two young boys as a small child, writing 'There has been a boy who Just lay down and Died' in her school journal after the first murder. Much of this poem was inspired by Gitta Sereny's Cries Unheard."

CASSANDRA DE ALBA lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. She's published several chapbooks and performed on three National Poetry Slam teams. Her work has appeared in Amethyst Arsenic and Red Lightbulbs.

Kimberly Poitevin

RAILWAY SESTINA

You and I had walked along those tracks
just months before. The dead brown leaves
crunched beneath our fearless feet. Our path
glowed beneath the moonlight. We held hands.
Far off, a whistle blew its shrill alarm.
The train approached, then passed. We went our way.

It's summer when two more come by this way,
perhaps already doomed. The railroad tracks
lead from a party to her home. His arm
wraps close around her waist. This time the leaves
are lush and green. She tucks one of her hands
in his back pocket. In wait, the psychopath

watches their approach and blocks their path.
He takes their money, finds a cunning way
to use their belts and his to bind their hands
and feet. He boldly stops them in their tracks
with just an old screwdriver. When he leaves,
they work the knots, but he's back soon, one arm

cradling a large rock. She sees alarm
flash across her lover's face, the path
splatter red with blood and brain, believes
she’ll die here too. But no—he goes away
once he's raped and beaten her, backtracks
the way he came. On the news, her hands

still shake. As cameras pan her face, those hands,
I think of us, nineteen, of how your arm
wrapped round me then. I think of those tracks,
the ways we might have crossed the psychopath.
of how, unlike them, we'd have walked away
unscathed. The heart believes what it believes,

and stubbornly, naively, mine believes
so long as you're with me, his brutal hands
can never touch me. You always find a way
to subdue him, or maybe we disarm
this man together, choose a path
of more resistance: fight, then flee those tracks.

But when you free my hands, say, "Run away!"
I cannot leave without you. We must go arm in arm
or not at all. Our paths are joined. We follow in their tracks.


Alison Dasho reads "Railway Sestina":



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Kimberly confesses: "In 1997, two college students in Lexington, Kentucky were attacked near some train tracks by a serial killer dubbed 'The Railway Killer.' A one-time boyfriend and I had walked the same tracks together just months earlier. Back then I still believed that being accompanied by a man was enough to guarantee a woman's safety."

KIMBERLY POITEVIN lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts with her husband and two sons. Her poems have most recently appeared (or are forthcoming) in Poetry Quarterly, 14 by 14, elimae, and Mobius: The Journal of Social Change.