Emma Janssen

Shrinking Sestina for Women’s Bodies

Under yesterday’s softly blueing sky I stood

wishing I had the words and grammars to write

that full air, that plane fingernailed into

the cloud-cover like a fading scar. There’s so much space

here that each night I get a good enough

picture of the stars and planets, spread wide

against relief of darkness. Lately I’m wider,

I’ve noticed in my room’s mirror, where I stand

so often these days, muscling against myself enough

that I feel satisfied, for a time. It’s not right,

I think, to continue eating up so much space.

I’d like to be made mostly of mind; I am much too

much body, and spend far too

much time thumbing over the wide

parts of myself, aching for space,

hollowness, where my hip bones now stand.

This is a womanlike thing, our obsessive rite,

learned before I was even old enough —

hardly even had body enough —

to displace any air. Today

a friend told me stanza means ‘room’. We wrote

for hours after, widening

our words enough to stand

in, languaging ourselves a space

for our bodies, space

held open enough

for even the strands

of constellations to

punctuate through, widen.

Whenever it’s us you write,

write

space

wide

enough

to

stand.

Katie Farris on Emma Janssen

“Shrinking Sestina for Women’s Bodies” creates a poetic tension from the very first line of the title. That tension between the poetic form of the sestina (made even more difficult by the author’s choice to shorten the piece’s lines as it progresses) and the content of the poem, which questions societal expectations about the space women’s bodies are expected to take up, is borne out most explicitly when the poem addresses form: “Today a friend told me stanza means ‘room’. We wrote/ for hours after, widening/ our words enough to stand in, languaging ourselves a space// for our bodies.” This poem is a wonderful example of how content can challenge form and vise versa.

Emma is a Bay Area local currently studying at the University of Chicago, where she reads a lot of books, does a bit of math, and spends time by Lake Michigan. Outside of school, she can be found swimming in any body of water, writing environmental journalism pieces, and learning languages. Her writing can be found in Expositions Magazine, the Between My Body and the Sky Anthology of YouthSpeaks, and Scrawl Place. Another sestina about gender and the body won the 2023 Robinson-Sykes Prize.