Tag: Kay Sage

Nadia Arioli: “On “The Answer Is No” by Kay Sage”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine
(You can view Sage’s painting “The Answer is No” here)

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On “The Answer Is No” by Kay Sage

Things left undone can become
a city, further out,
and have little lives of their own.

Mold blooms in teas you never tried.
Poems you meant to write paper a bathroom.
You are somewhere in that
city of unhemned garments.

The answer is “no” to a complicated question
I cannot bear to ask.
How “no” can become white noise
after a while, when uttered enough times.

Rapid spinning makes you weightless.
Preponderance becomes iteration,
iteration becomes quiet.

Quiet like barren,
quiet like cataracts,
quiet like something you slip into
your pocket and never let out.

I have glowed as much as I could,
in green and other light.
There was nothing left to do but scream.

Now you’re waiting for me again,
past the frames holding canvasses
like gums hold teeth.
I’m on my way.

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About the Author: Nadia Arioli (nee Wolnisty) is the founder and editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spry, SWWIM, Apogee, Penn Review, McNeese Review, Kissing Dynamite, Bateau, Heavy Feather Review, Whale Road Review, SOFTBLOW, and others. They have chapbooks from Cringe-Worthy Poetry Collective, Dancing Girl Press, and a full-length from Spartan.

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More by Nadia Arioli:

On “I Walk Without Echo” by Kay Sage

On “The Fourteen Daggers” by Kay Sage

Nadia Arioli: On “The Fourteen Daggers” by Kay Sage

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

(You can view Sage’s painting “The Fourteen Daggers” here)

 

 

On “The Fourteen Daggers” by Kay Sage

All the prosaic thin places you will visit
are before you. The places where reality
shifts a bit to the right like a staircase
or fourteen daggers that fail to kill you.

A movie theater in a foreign city
where you are alone. You sit in front
of the projector directly. A story bounces
around your head. A laundromat,
any time, any place. Things are getting
clean without you.

The tobacco store where the man
with thick glasses coughs a little worse
each year. A gas station with maps
of the Midwest for sale. The state-lines
look menacing. The old ship,
below deck, where buckets cluster
like drippy ulcers.

A smaller place is your mouth after
your first nosebleed. You saw what happened
to your teeth when you smiled for the mirror.
When you were a teenager, you filled your palms
with wet bees for the watery shudder.

The eighth dagger is you.
O my Angelica root,
O my toothy abortion.

I will not say what the other six are.
I can’t even see the last. Perhaps
it is shaped like a gun.

If a third were to see us,
they would know which was you
and which was I.
I am the beginning, you are the middle
and more like a knife.

But perhaps we are in each other’s houses
now, switched like interpreting a dream badly.
The waiting room was the thinnest place.
My breasts are scalloped like fingernails.

 

 

About the Author: Nadia Arioli (nee Wolnisty) is the founder and editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spry, SWWIM, Apogee, Penn Review, McNeese Review, Kissing Dynamite, Bateau, Heavy Feather Review, Whale Road Review, SOFTBLOW, and others. They have chapbooks from Cringe-Worthy Poetry Collective, Dancing Girl Press, and a full-length from Spartan.

 

More by Nadia Arioli:

On “I Walk Without Echo” by Kay Sage

Nadia Arioli: “On “I Walk Without Echo” by Kay Sage”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

 

(You can view Sage’s painting “I Walk Without Echo” here)

 

 

On “I Walk Without Echo” by Kay Sage

To be a woman is to be caustic
with no power. To instigate

but not to burn. A bellyless earthquake,
a doctor’s bill that goes on and on.

They say we were made second.
Helpmate, companion, never the main

story. A plot point in a chapter
about blood. We go back,

the feminine parts of ourselves,
fetus Matryoshka dolls.

My mother said I looked like one
as a baby. I thought she meant I was

one. I learned in an encyclopedia
I was right. My mother was in utero

with ova. An ovum became half
of me. I’ve still got most my eggs.

To be second but half already there
and while carrying half of the next feels

like a mathematical anomaly,
the kind that would fill a volume.

I sat holding up my dress, bent into three
points: head, knees, one between. Lips

out like shellfish. I want to walk
without echo. I wait on a porcelain ear.

I picture it—perfectly round O’s
of red. Such a bright color in the dark.

I will it: I walk without echo.
Bleed, damn you.

 

 

About the Author: Nadia Arioli (nee Wolnisty) is the founder and editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spry, SWWIM, Apogee, Penn Review, McNeese Review, Kissing Dynamite, Bateau, Heavy Feather Review, Whale Road Review, SOFTBLOW, and others. They have chapbooks from Cringe-Worthy Poetry Collective, Dancing Girl Press, and a full-length from Spartan.