Jellyfish the Bones, or: The Sestina is the Difference between the Sestina and Itself

Let blue the beach / blue the jellyfish
Let the syntax remain identical
in the face of contrary evidence
contrarian difference
Let endless skies of risk be the metaphor
for whatever feeling

you were feeling
       last night. Last night, a jellyfish
was not a metaphor
for my heart; she was identical
                  with her former self, and the difference
   between the two is evidence

of nothing but evidence
—how it ceases. How it fails. How are you feeling
about the passage of time and the difference
between a flatline and a dead jellyfish?
How are you feeling about the identical
words on both sides of the ‘is?’ Is that the metaphor

—not what it declares, but the metaphor
itself? In the presence of its form, is its evidence
its syntactical absence? Is its absence identical
with its propositional identity—or is that just the feeling
of loneliness on the equal sign’s other side? If the jellyfish
is always the jellyfish, what is the difference

between the jellyfish and its difference
with itself? The subject/object divide is only metaphor
until syntax gets involved. Holds them apart. Jellyfish
the bones / the blue / the syntax / the evidence
/ jellyfish the night / until nothing holds itself in being but the feeling
of expansion of becoming of being no longer identical

with the self. Let every identical
alteration teach you the meaning of difference.
How the golden lights’ swing over the dark alley becomes the feeling
of the car horn’s low release into morning’s green fog. The metaphor
is the metaphor. The evidence
is the evidence. The beach is now blue. The jellyfish

is now the feeling of being identical
with the jellyfish, which is the only difference
between the metaphor and the evidence.

Lizzy Ke Polishan is a poet and author from Pennsylvania. Her recent poems appear in or are forthcoming from Gulf Coast, Passages North, Waxwing, Poet Lore, Black Warrior Review, petrichor., EPOCH, RHINO, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. She is the current Managing Editor of River & South Review, a poetry reader for Psaltery & Lyre, and a Guest Editor at Palette Poetry. Her first poetry collection, A Little Book of Blooms, was published in 2020. You can find her on her website https://www.lizzykepolishan.com or on Instagram @dizzymiss.lizzy.