The Answer is No, by Stacey Balkun

The Answer is No, by Kay Sage (USA), 1958.

The Answer is No

What does it mean to keep stretching
these canvases--
                              latticework, a new musculature

drapery
                            as good as new skin
                        a new face

to act through?
                     Each conception
                            slips the elastic

behind my head           I become Kay
  the artist   then           ship bones  or

             a bridge for sparrows—a landscape     eventually
             a wall.
                          A metaphysical experiment
a canvas of blank canvases--

          the mask, unmasked--

                              propped before    behind
                              so many        others

but even I’m surprised when it’s not me
                under the heavy oil, the hard line. Not me at all.

Stacey Balkun

Stacey Balkun is the author of Jackalope-Girl Learns to Speak (dancing girl 2016) & Lost City Museum (ELJ 2016). A Finalist for the 2016 Event Horizon Science Poetry Competition as well as the Center for Women Writer's 2016 Rita Dove Award, her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Muzzle, THRUSH, Bayou, and others. A 2015 Hambidge Fellow, Stacey served as Artist-in-Residence at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2013. She holds an MFA from Fresno State and teaches poetry online at The Poetry Barn.