Sarah Giragosian

Obvious Augury

Let’s pause for a moment the anvils
falling from the sky, the breakneck
jig of empire, the long tendrils of grief 

that keep growing with us, coiling around
our necks and camouflaging who we once were.
Here we are, different, not quite young, 

not quite old, but smart enough not to envy
the immortal jellyfish who can reverse
her life cycle when it all gets to be too much

and do it all again, polyp to adult.
The brunt of surviving four years
in a dingy motel, its windows blacked out, 

its boilers stammering out more gas than heat.
Observe: another unreversible decision, another gang-
planked future. Observe: our faces maps of rising panic.

Why is a wren in the house a bad omen? In the fashion
of the times, we make meaning after she dies,
exhausted, our windows shuttered against the wind.

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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.