Sarah Giragosian

Nocturne for Elise

Changing, the smell and startle of your body,
which wakes now at any slight stirring of mine,
that is sweat-sticky and is ripening with sweetness
like that scent of snowdrops after a rainstorm in April.
Your curls cool and float on these thinning sheets,
and as we drift in and out of sleep, there’s an aroma of rising
dough from behind your neck like loaves puffing
under the oven of the moon. I cannot resist the soft paunch
of your belly under my palm, the quench of your touch,
and it’s true: time feels more and more like a circle
while I watch this open curve that is the cycle
of your body transforming, where I too will follow.
We are not butterflies frozen under glass, we know,
but you curse this stage of womanhood: the body’s leaks
and liabilities now vexing and bloody,
its calendar now off-kilter with the moon,
but in sync with more voracious, messy things
like crows and tributaries seeking the river.
Down the road, it swells and bloats
with rainwater and clay, and the fat mosquitos,
on their way to somewhere else, find our tender parts
and suck and suck as we turn and turn in sleep.

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Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collections Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017) and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). 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.