Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This clever poem meditates on—and elevates—the word No in ways I haven’t seen before. I think, of course, of the issue of consent in intimate relationships, and the power that No needs to have in that context, but Sophia Stid also uses the language of the spiritual, particularly Christian, making this kind of No a counterpoint to the Yes that made Adam, the Yes of Mary to the angel Gabriel. It’s a word some of us need to say to create boundaries and focus on self-care. It’s a refusal. It’s a sky-splitter, as Stid elegantly puts it.
Before the Fiat
There’s no word for a No that’s holy
but I want that word. I want you
to cross yourself when you hear it,
saying, The Word of the Lord. I want
you to kneel and unstrap your shoes,
knowing that No makes ground sacred
and dangerous. God said No and I say
No and every No I’ve said unstraps
my life. No is one-word psalm, nonstop
revelation. I had a wilderness of years
when words, unsaid, choked my throat.
God spoke me out: the first word was
No. The sky split. I could breathe that air.
Sophia Stid is a writer from California. She is the winner of the 2017 Francine Ringold Award for New Writers and the 2019 Witness Literary Award in Poetry. Recent poems and essays can be found in Image, Beloit Poetry Journal, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others.
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