Poetry

FALL 2026
 

Lovers Talk of Something that Sounds Like Evolution

by SARAH GIRAGOSIAN

Is it reckless, you ask, to store our love in ritual gestures?
Like scattering seeds for the birds and entrusting our future
legacy, tree-like, to the bees and wind or swapping moods
and warm drinks, private jokes and viruses; scuffing
down the porch steps with the daily scattershot
prints of our shoes? Love in the topography of the snail
shell, domed and spiraled; love in the molting snakeskin
that makes room for new growth; love in the secret
clamped inside the nacred room of the oyster.
Like painting the same house, the same house
for ages to get it just right. All those canvases
stretched and covered. Trial and error, trial and error,
and sometimes mistakes and sometimes pain
and sometimes laughter in between.

 
 

White-plumed Honeyeaters by Michaela Farrington

 
 

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Sarah Giragosian

Sarah Giragosian is the author of Queer Fish, winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and The Death Spiral. 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 debut memoir What Kind of Hawk is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions. Her writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Electric Literature, Pleiades, The Hopper, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.