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dancing girl press, 2014
$7.00 Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis' first book, Intaglio, was published by Kent State University Press in 2006. Her chapbook, EMUseum, a collaboration with Caleb Adler was published by Dancing Girl Press and a collaborative chapbook with Cynthia Arrieu-King won the 2011 Dreamhorse Chapbook Prize. Poems have appeared in Anti-, Boston Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern & Hotel Amerika. An associate professor at Columbus College of Art and Design, she is the faculty advisor for Botticelli Literary/Art Magazine. Along with Kathrine Wright, hosts www.sweetlydisturbed.com The Talkies Did Us In We’d have survived the movies alone--all motion, no sound. But something in us craved a voice. Some mild and fake assurance we aren’t alone. Several nights found me hanging back behind the curtain, listening, not listening to the lines you’d rehearsed so many times I could have played you had you called in sick at showtime. Not the words that held me there, but your voice as it rose vibrato from the cellar of your body. I wanted it—like a rope to lead me down into you. To mine for just one thing the audience couldn’t get from you. Some pure particle that was all and only you. To know you better than ever you’d been known and for always—in my own way, I married you. Listening to you was always listening-in, eavesdropping with the crowd, and sometimes it seemed like a world of us there--glass to the wall. Except all the others were able to applaud or walk out. Then that perfect quiet, the nights when, your back to the footboard, my back to the headboard each of us holding a book, no one needed speech at all. Just what would have made us want to invent the violin with a voice so human, that it made us cry? An instrument that splashed its own grief back up into our faces, and made us believe in a kind of empathy we could only imagine from the soul-less, the inanimate or sometimes the household pets. Jubilee, there’s a reason why everyone who loves you is so sad. |