In the Air
Not the pent-up buds, not the humming-
birds, cut from rainbow, caroming home,
nor the fizzy-sloppy delight of being pumped
up on phytoncides from forests
so hyper-oxygenated that even you can breathe
easy. Not the veins of snowmelt that pool
around your boots, sousing them in mud,
recalling bygone childhood joy. Nor even
the genre of delight that bird chitchat
and song afford. No, in this season of thaw and make-
do nurseries, take peace in believing
that this sudden multiplication of life can exist
with and alongside genocide
for only so long. Capitalism’s landscape of anxiety
too must die, and the plunder from above
of those below. Think boiling points, think uprisings
and the Arab Springs, think oustings and Minneapolis
police violence that cannot be condoned
any longer. Take heart that these triggers
may be like the “impending storm” in Haiti in 1791
or like “the ancient call for bread” and roses
in a Massachusetts factory in 1912. Now the grass,
tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf.
Now your pent-up grief, tomorrow that first prickle
of outrage in your velvet soul that will spring
forth unbidden, the first revolt.
Note: Several of the lines in “In the Air” are drawn from other sources, including William Carlos Williams’ “Spring and All,” Robert Frost’s “Spring Pools,” Guillaume Raynal’s words which predicted the Haitian slave revolt, referring to the early signs of revolt as an “impending storm,” and James Oppenheim’s “Bread and Roses.”
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A queer writer, Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collections Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017), The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), and Mother Octopus, co-winner of the 2024 Halcyon Prize (Middle Creek Press). In 2023, the University of Akron Press released her co-edited craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems. Her poems and essays have appeared in such journals as Orion, Ecotone, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, and Terrain.org, among others.
