Alejandro Lucero reads “Returning” from our new issue Shō No. 6 (Winter 2024/25).
“Sestinas make for such fun headaches! It’s my favorite form because I love playing with homophones and testing the limits of the end-word. The form’s repetition also helps me think through patterns and cycles people and places go through. In this poem, I am thinking about how patterns, cycles, and repetitions fail our bodies and our land.”
– Alejandro Lucero
Alejandro Lucero’s chapbook, Sapello Son, was named the Editors’ Selection for the 2022 Frost Place Competition (Bull City Press, 2024). His latest work appears and is forthcoming in Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, The Florida Review, and The Southern Review. He lives in Baltimore, where he teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and is a managing editor for The Hopkins Review.
An earlier version of “Returning” by Alejandro Lucero won the 2021 Iris N. Spencer Undergraduate Poetry Award and was first published on the West Chester University Poetry Center website.
This poem is featured in Shō No. 6 (Winter 2024/25).
Share this poem