Here for beads of water to play catch me if you can with the sunlight and slip off the ledge of the world like a deluge of bright coins. Here, speck-like, you are in—not on—the earth. Inside a morse code of rocks that spell out Look closer while the cascade plays lead singer to the backup of your voice. You are a drizzle-tousled bird dangling over the gorge, chafing equally against the fall and rail. Waterfalls beckon and drum out a watery tempo on stones smoothed to glass, their songs describing proper confusions of air and water, body and mist. Can you fill the watering can behind your chest with that thrum? Flirt with the drop-off point again, and you can feel the minnow of your heart flipping. And then, out of nowhere, flitting medallions, a bounty of yellow swallowtails, pin themselves to your chest before they fly off to adorn another hero. Nothing is assigned this summer, only your homework
to study water’s
hammer on rock up to the point
you’re erased for good.
—
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.
