‘​What Was Left of the Sestina after Looking at a Photo Album of My Father’s Squadron’ by Brad Trumpfheller​

As a failed poet re: sestinas, I perhaps love the gesture towards the form more than its completion. The shattered sestina continues to break us open with repetition and complication of image, but makes those turns even more surprising. I’ll wade in a compelling sestina for about 3–4 stanzas before I catch on, but since I mostly bypassed the title on first read here (oops), I swam out even further until the floating lines gave me those holds to consider, and then I looped back and appreciated how Brad manages to consistently build distance, even from the title. ‘Looking at a photo album of [their] father’s squadron’ replicates bodies drawn into war, and yet the speaker will likely only encounter these men from behind this plastic veneer and doesn’t even know their names. Isn’t that the nature of a name, only existing when someone knows to call? Isn’t that the epitome of empire: how many hands must crown the cause before they fall to obscurity?

“Squadron” in this context sonically implies a geometry and the idea of order & mission, whereas “squad” could be closer read to a queer context; this particular distance-by-word-choice feels intentional. Consider how there’s a man in the arms / of a man, carried like a husband might carry / his husband. & [their] father is there. Laughing / at this impossible wedding. Here, I long to see others’ faces when encountering these linked men because if laughter is used to denote amongness, as Kaveh Akbar said, did anyone else see this as worthy of mirth? Did any shrink away or snort for the illusion of similarity? When the father is foregrounded, this affection is “impossible,” but what if we unfocus him and move to another body: the speaker’s? They say, when I came out / to him, he thought I was joking. Disbelief / can be a crown of dust. Here’s the discrepancy—in another mouth, the speaker’s truth bends to question, their crown transforming to ash in their hair. My read of queerness—as validating/venerating what straight people (especially men) deem unnecessary/inaccessible—feels most underscored in the last lines: Oh, today I am impossible / & headless. These ask, would you rather keep chopping yourself in pieces or own your identity, even if that means denying another plane?

I also want to loop into some middle images. I love how “desert of fathers” both posits these men as possible surrogate fathers, again putting distance between the speaker and theirs, while the space feels swollen with the absence of families. “Desert turned kingdom” implies that they’ve constructed this palace together and fortified it against others. Yet the possible danger of a squad(ron) is that there isn’t enough of a varied scope to keep everyone from getting stuck in their ways. Rather, the role makes you brittle. I wonder how much of the father’s unwillingness to take in the child stems from not knowing how to meet a different set of challenges/identities (not that that’d be an excuse). These men feel so connected to each other, even when they aren’t touching, that it’s unsurprising that the speaker finds these photos to be worth devoting [them]self to. I see them as not so much needing the squad, but some allegiance/alignment for themself.

Beyond the form mirroring the content seamlessly, this poem is so sonically and imagistically rich that I’m pulling apart couplets and turning these repeated/remixed images over in my mind still. Come wade in with me.

Muzzle