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According to the Gospel of Yes

Dana Levin

It’s a thrill to say No.

The way it smothers

everything that beckons―

Any baby in a crib

will meet No’s palm

on its mouth.

And nothing sweet

can ever happen

―

to No―

who holds your tongue captive

behind your teeth, whose breath

whets the edge

―

of the guillotine―

N, head of Team Nothing,

and anti-ovum O.

And so the pit can never

engender

―

the cherry―

in No, who has drilled a hole

inside your body―

No.

Say it out loud.

Why do you love the hole

No makes.

Dana Levin is the author of Banana Palace (Copper Canyon Press, 2016) and Sky Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2011), among other books. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

About Dana Levin

Occasion

Women's History Month

Themes

About this Poem

“I was stomping around my house, saying ‘No’ (why? I cannot remember) and suddenly felt how it made a hole in my throat. My thoughts turned to the Doctrine of Signatures: a medieval idea that the forms of things suggest their function. We still see it in alternative food theory: a carrot slice looks like an eye, therefore carrots are good for sight, for example. Here it's about the sound and feel of saying ‘No’ in English: No as a hole-maker, an eraser, a pit. But: No can also be helpful, necessary, crucial. Thus: who might have an investment in libeling No? Why Yes, of course. I’m working now on a Gospel of No, where Yes comes in for similar treatment.”

—Dana Levin

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More by this poet

Ars Poetica (cocoons)

Six monarch butterfly cocoons
      clinging to the back of your throat—

      you could feel their gold wings trembling.

You were alarmed. You felt infested.
In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,
      gagging to spit them out—
            and a voice saying Don’t, don’t—

Dana Levin

2005

A Skull

is like a house
          with a brain inside. Another place
where eating
          and thinking
                     tango and spar—

Dana Levin

2019

Styx

You put a bag around your head and walked into the river.
You

walked into the river with a bag around your head and you were
never dead 

game on the banks of your
mental styx

for the double
audience

of smoke—


               —


You pressed a coin into his palm and stepped across the water.
You

stepped across the water with a hand on his arm and he was
silent and kind as you
               shoved off, toward the smoky coils

of the greek-seeming dead—
You’d been trying to sleep.

Found yourself here
in the mythocryptic land—

The river


               —


had widened to a lake.

Dana Levin

2011

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According to the Gospel of Yes

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