Sarah Giragosian: OCD

To survive this exile, you will need

to hold court with the moon, store the memory

of its light in a mason jar for later.

Understand: there’s no field guide for this,

for what you will encounter, for when the sluice

gate of your mind opens, for the whetstone

of your doubts or the homespun loop of Whys?

Even when your mind seems to have nothing left

to plunder, What if, in a certain key,

snags at your heart again. If you could dare

the feral child of time to stop cuffing your wrist

just to drag you down another detour, you might

just make it, but you can’t let go. 

To survive this exile, plan for the times

your thoughts will turn to snapping turtles;

it’s safest to approach from behind. Beware the tail,

the backlash and tango of open possibilities.

Keep close the sprig of secrets that grow

just below your chest pocket. You’ll need poetry

to face this, and metaphors like blinkering flashlights

to pass among your people if you return.

This poem appeared in Bellevue Literary Review's ISSUE 39 READING THE BODY where BLR Celebrates Mental Health Awareness Month

Reading in New York City

#ZICPoetry

Sarah Giragosian: Leda

Afterwards, pregnant,
she moved into a third-floor apartment
and spent her cash on reprints.
And in them, the men,
the mythmakers, who heard her story
told in the bird’s words,
turned her—in picture after picture—
into tragic furniture or
a doll-body draped
around the roundness of the god
of gods, whose extended neck
lanced across her belly
and pinned her under
a mountain of feathers.

While the creatures grew and dabbled
within her, she drew portraits of herself
not as woman or beast,
but as machine—
a windmill with lines as hard
as her jaw and blades spotlighted
with wind lines.

To be efficient, quotidian, intact—
not Dutch nor quixotic:
this was her wish.
Flowerless, her landscapes were filled
with fissures in the earth, outlines
of cliffs as broad as giant’s legs,
and a narrow pass between them.

Forty days later, a twitching
and bustling inside the eggs
broke the spell of her sleep,
and she watched the creatures peck
and head-poke the encasings,
their progress slow,
more excruciating than exquisite.
She imagined all of them into existence:
chicks within a close-quartered mine,
tapping at the veins
where any light is a surprise
to newborn eyes and the slightest glint
might be the first sighting





of gold or an opening.

Sarah Giragosian: Eros

the fold in the belly;

                        love

                                (the verb)

                                        bouncy in its parentheses;

the giant squid’s foot-wide eye

                                      mostly veiled from us,

and the idea of its eighth arm

                         twining with another;

the thrill of restraint

                                          against desire,

                  the anonymity of the caretaker

who will anoint us

                          in our final bath;

the blindfold

                            and the lightness of the hand

               on the small of our back. 

Sarah Giragosian: The Last Animal

When we kill, we do it well.

I have paid to see their bones

encased in glass: rib cage,

incisors, broken femurs

suspended by wires. Skeletons

require care. Stuntwork. I’ve stroked

the memory of tortoise

in concrete parks, and loitered in halls

of heads and thrusting torsos.

When we kill, we do it well.

We strip the trees of music,

we miss the flowers, we forget

that metaphors are molecular.

When no one notes again

the inner tension of the crouching fox

before it vaults over the fence

or the hungry cat that enters a room,

tail swishing, to assert a mood,

who will notice the first signs

of the suicidal? Do not mistake me

killer, friend.

Sarah Giragosian: Zoo Dream

Below a vertical zoo, at the edge

of waking, I dream up a vast body

with a domed head, skin tougher than a tortoise’s,

and I —in the new tenancy of my elephantness—

test my trunk, a casual pendulum

as precise as a dragonfly’s landing,

and fan my ears like a lady shaking

out drapery.   Propulsion begins, as it must,

with the idea of mother; my own— I know—is away,

lost or exiled from this place of exile

and I must find her (laws of early love

transpose us). Beneath the crush of my legs,

the stairs sway and buckle, and each landing carries

a mewling and baying. Still I tramp for miles, searching.

Soon I am a pure tug, a handler’s dream.

Sarah Giragosian: Leftover

I have un-marbled your lunch pail

of its patina of jelly, its bloom of mold.

What to do now but finger the clasp, locked like a jaw?

Each little elegy I write

steers me farther from you, and still there’s this groping

for form. I find the dusky petals of your fingers

on the window glass and the walls;

you are whorled along the blurred rim of my vision.

I don’t write about heaven, just the oculus-moon,

the opening I see from below,

while I assign structure to this grief. I’ll keep you

in shoe boxes, albums, drawers: you’ll have to be dug out.

I thumb the unmiraculous

detritus of your life. All’s qualified and blessed—

all the echoes and distillations of you: plastics

and boxers, the grimed towels strewn

and eddying around the door, the dandruff pearled

on the dresser, the sweat line plumbed down the threadbare shirt.

Sarah Giragosian winner of the American Poetry Journal Prize

Congratulations to Sarah Giragosian of Hartford, CT, who won the 2014 American Poetry Journal Prize for Queer Fish. She received $1,000 and her book will be published by Dream Horse Press.

Giragosian’s poetry has been published in Crazyhorse, Copper Nickel, and Ninth Letter, among others. She earned her PhD in English from the University at Albany-SUNY. She teaches English at Bridgewater State University.  

Sarah Giragosian: The Display

I.
Gone: the lilac dive,
the glitter of pollen. Gone
too are the cosmos.


II.
Bestowed on a tack,
below the thorax, the name
Papilio hovers.


III.
The grave enclosure
frames the line-up: they’re tagged now,
stiff in their lockup.


IV.
Mounted, splayed like cards,
the Pieridae are flightless,
like scissored play-hearts.


V.
Moths, their negatives,
seem over-exposed, their scales
like gauze in bulbed light.


VI.
The voyeur eye frets
at their flourished laterals,
their backs gripped by pins.


V.
Not stomped on, nor swept
away, these bugs, with pupil-
patterned wings, stare back.


This poem has previously appeared in The Formalist