Foreword

We contacted the artists in this issue to contribute to NAUSIKAE in late 2019. A contemporary reader will understand this means that the work was born on the cusp of the COVID-19 pandemic. We waited a year to publish this, in hopes that we’d be able to throw a release party with live music and celebration. It now seems inane to center the magazine around a public gathering within a context antithetical to such an event. We hope that even without a formal cheers, the reader will percept our excitement for the works featured here.

Sharon Olds has been beloved to us (Mina and Naomi) and to our friendship for a number of years. We were shown Olds’s poetry collection Satan Says during our time at Columbia and were immediately enamored with it. It fixates on themes of blood, womanhood, birth, the body, agency, and death. We selected the titular poem (located on the following spread) as the source for our artists. The poem is a story, told by a narrator who must take direction from the devil in order to release herself from a locked box.

Olds discusses language as power. We have seen how language has been central to all (in tandem with the strategic activism that has erupted over the past year) in educating and connecting people within a national system that continues to fail in new and disgusting ways. As much as we know language can relay truth, we also realize how it is used to spread conspiracy and misinformation. We continue to publish NAUSIKAE because we refuse to let willful ignorance co-opt a system of communication that is meant to foster mutual understanding.

The idea of art responding to art (in this case, our artists responding to “Satan Says”) is an example of art as an antidote. We believe that by directly creating or by fostering the creation of something (whether this comes in the form of a drawing or a meal, a rhythm you tap with your finger while you’re waiting in line, a flower you plant in the garden), you keep the unwelcome kinds of calamity at bay.

Of course, the kinds of creation we seek are the ones that result in darkness and shadow. We (the two of us) turn to horror in moments of horror (i.e. the past calendar year), because, as noted in our inaugural issue, “it operates at the extremes of human emotion, and explores the spectrum of our feelings in a society that is so fixated on suppressing feelings.” Therefore, we feel alienated by expressions of art that do not seek to confront the limits of human existence.

Perhaps you will feel uncomfortable with certain words or images on these pages in a way that, we hope, is enlightening and not triggering. We ask you to question what it is that brings these emotions to the surface.

Thank you for supporting the magazine, and we hope to see you all soon.

Mina and Naomi, NAUSIKAE NYC

“Satan Says”

I am locked in a little cedar box

with a picture of shepherds pasted onto

the central panel between carvings.

The box stands on curved legs.

It has a gold, heart-shaped lock

and no key. I am trying to write my

way out of the closed box

redolent of cedar. Satan

comes to me in the locked box

and says, I’ll get you out. Say

My father is a shit. I say

my father is a shit and Satan

laughs and says, It’s opening.

Say your mother is a pimp.

My mother is a pimp. Something

opens and breaks when I say that.

My spine uncurls in the cedar box

like the pink back of the ballerina pin

with a ruby eye, resting beside me on

satin in the cedar box.

Say shit, say death, say fuck the father,

Satan says, down my ear.

The pain of the locked past buzzes

in the child’s box on her bureau, under

the terrible round pond eye

etched around with roses, where

self-loathing gazed at sorrow.

Shit. Death. Fuck the father.

Something opens. Satan says

Don’t you feel a lot better?

Light seems to break on the delicate

edelweiss pin, carved in two

colors of wood. I love him too,

you know, I say to Satan dark

in the locked box. I love them but

I’m trying to say what happened to us

in the lost past. Of course, he says

and smiles, of course. Now say: torture.

I see, through blackness soaked in cedar,

the edge of a large hinge open.

Say: the father’s cock, the mother’s

cunt, says Satan, I’ll get you out.

The angle of the hinge widens

until I see the outlines of

the time before I was, when they were

locked in the bed. When I say

the magic words, Cock, Cunt,

Satan softly says, Come out.

But the air around the opening

is heavy and thick as hot smoke.

Come in, he says, and I feel his voice

breathing from the opening.

The exit is through Satan’s mouth.

Come in my mouth, he says, you’re there

already, and the huge hinge

begins to close. Oh no, I loved

them, too, I brace

my body tight

in the cedar house.

Satan sucks himself out the keyhole.

I’m left locked in the box, he seals

the heart-shaped lock with the wax of his tongue.

It’s your coffin now, Satan says.

I hardly hear;

I am warming my cold

hands at the dancer’s

ruby eye—

the fire, the suddenly discovered knowledge of love.

the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of

Pittsburgh Press.

Source: Satan Says (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980)