Sarah Giragosian: The Dry Spell
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
A Small Violence
The cat, out of love, killed a bird
and cached it in the house for us.
I found a feather shivering near
the radiator, another pinioned in the seam
of your sweater. I imagine us in a year
or two preparing to move, the house spitting
up bones in a forgotten corner. Love,
do you remember when we crossed that foreign river
you warned me about vipers roiling
in the icy waters? Remember the dry spell,
the low waters, the craquelure of clay
between each river pass? Forked like a tongue,
it led us back to a cliff side, its spine
cracked by a cascade too powerful for us
to swim under. We flatfooted penguin-wise
around the slippery rocks until we discovered
a turquoise pool; not rent apart by the fall’s frigid spray,
we were pinned together by it.
Sarah Giragosian is a poet and critic living in Schenectady, NY. She is the author of the poetry collection Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017) and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, forthcoming). Her poems have recently appeared in such journals as Ecotone, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and Denver Quarterly, among others.
