I won’t bury that part of me that is still boy between moth and butterfly who plundered blueberries from the tall grasses and sang of pine fringed with bird rhymes who followed the tracks of coyote and fox. I won’t bury that part of me other timelines rock and dandelion and stardust that part had no notion of exile no notion of law or prescription an immigrant among many genders. Homeland meant blisters on my hands it meant being wired to the sun and Mother’s garden-cadenced voice it meant velocity of my bicycle and my neighbor’s American chestnut tree with its prickled pockets of nuts prized like glitter and ant farms Why should I resolve the unmapped parts of me selected or sloughed off skins to bind or unbind more sun shower than child summer on my flat chest sunflower and sweat that part of me knew History as déjà vu firing through my skull knew bliss sweet talking a toad stockpiling flower petals and their secrets that knuckled my own way through soil. I flirted with every border flimsy as a screen between gossip and birdsong. I was literate in the relationship in the breaking point between my body and schools of bright fish.
Sarah Giragosian is the author of Queer Fish, winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and The Death Spiral. In 2023, the University of Akron Press released the craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, which she co-edited. She also wrote Mother Octopus, a co-winner of the Halcyon Prize. Her writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Tin House, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.
