Nadia Arioli

Poem for Frances

(even though you are not yet hatched)

I hope you walk on water,

not like Jesus but like a duck-

ling. A willful miracle for those who know

where to look and ungainly in a way a machine

could never. No need for grace.

You, always a storm, even before your arrival.

I had thought these metaphors and similes

were ways to know, synapses by which we think.

I wrote a paper about it my youth,

bloated by its own fat assuredness.

Perhaps I am just tired, but now I feel like enough already.

We get it! Things are like other things!

But, O, you are helping me posit something new,

something will be formed as it arrives,

my duckling. My belly has gone to strained

egg, omphalos wriggling and inverted. In the

end, it’s not about knowing, it’s about hope.

It’s about sticking your beak out and saying Hello,

the world has something to offer, and I to it,

that is why I am making the connection.

Metaphor: to carry across.

Feet across water, knife across paper.

You carry yourself, the thing with feathers,

May you always go, propelled by your own force.

May you, daughter, always perform and be the miracle,

kicking in the corners of my world.

Nadia Arioli is the cofounder and editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Arioli’s poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net three times and for the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Cider Press Review, Rust + Moth, McNeese Review, Penn Review, Mom Egg, and elsewhere. Essays have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Hunger Mountain, Heavy Feather Review, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. Artwork has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in Permafrost, Kissing Dynamite, Meat for Tea, Pithead Chapel, Rogue Agent, and Poetry Northwest. Arioli’s forthcoming collections are with Dancing Girl Press and Fernwood Press. 

Nadia Arioli

Poem for Frances

(even though you are not yet hatched)

I hope you walk on water,

not like Jesus but like a duck-

ling. A willful miracle for those who know

where to look and ungainly in a way a machine

could never. No need for grace.

You, always a storm, even before your arrival.

I had thought these metaphors and similes

were ways to know, synapses by which we think.

I wrote a paper about it my youth,

bloated by its own fat assuredness.

Perhaps I am just tired, but now I feel like enough already.

We get it! Things are like other things!

But, O, you are helping me posit something new,

something will be formed as it arrives,

my duckling. My belly has gone to strained

egg, omphalos wriggling and inverted. In the

end, it’s not about knowing, it’s about hope.

It’s about sticking your beak out and saying Hello,

the world has something to offer, and I to it,

that is why I am making the connection.

Metaphor: to carry across.

Feet across water, knife across paper.

You carry yourself, the thing with feathers,

May you always go, propelled by your own force.

May you, daughter, always perform and be the miracle,

kicking in the corners of my world.

Nadia Arioli is the cofounder and editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Arioli’s poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net three times and for the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Cider Press Review, Rust + Moth, McNeese Review, Penn Review, Mom Egg, and elsewhere. Essays have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Hunger Mountain, Heavy Feather Review, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. Artwork has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in Permafrost, Kissing Dynamite, Meat for Tea, Pithead Chapel, Rogue Agent, and Poetry Northwest. Arioli’s forthcoming collections are with Dancing Girl Press and Fernwood Press. 

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