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.

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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.