My Sestina: Still Life with Moon Boots and Rain

Here is my sestina with the obligatory words selected by my Intro to Creative Writing Class. Enjoy! I look forward to reading your sestinas!

Still Life with Moon Boots and Rain

It was my adolescence. I wore moon boots
In the rain. Tried to be cool. Read
Death of a Salesman in tenth grade. I ran
In the hallway between classes: not cool. Fear dogged
Me. I was a fly
On the wall of popularity. I wasn’t having sex.

Can you believe it? What is sexier
Than a girl wearing moon boots?
I was fly before fly was fly.
I knew I was cool. I’d read
The Preppy Handbook. But I also was a dog,
A “good” girl not a “nice” girl; a girl with a run

In her tights, a girl who wouldn’t run
With the bad boys. I wouldn’t go all the way,
But my friends would. Boys would dog
Me in the hallways, parody my moon boot
Stride, fondle their own crotches, I’d redden,
Give them my best fake guffaw, then fly

Off down the hallway. I dreamed of flying
Away with Bogart, or to Pamplona, running
With the bulls, me and Hemingway, I’d read
The Sun Also Rises; I was sexier
Than Brett. Wasn’t I? I’d never moon over the boots
Of some matador. I wasn’t that kind of dog,

Licking the boots of the boys who kicked me. I was the dog,
The ugly kind, the “friend,” a f------ lie,
A girl who could hold her beer and keep one moon boot
On the floor at all times. I never ran
Away from a challenge, or from sex.
My friends ran toward it. Those girls didn’t read

Past the first page, and believed every word they read.
They believed, for example, that those dogs
Would marry them. That they, the girls, would want to; that sex,
The original problem, would be the answer, that they would fly
Off to paradise, happily ever, blah, blah, cut to the run
Away scene: divorcee with ski pro and moonboots.

That was my adolescence: sexless, dreams of flight,
I read by lamplight, Lolita and doggerel,
I would have run, if I’d had somewhere to go: call it still life with moon boots and rain.