Do birds dreaming midflight ever rouse themselves into a world with an unfamiliar sky and an equivocal view? Shocked by an uncanny topography, how do they stay aloft in those moments? Or is it just humans that pick apart the seams between dreaming and waking? And what ineffable creatures ruffle the edges of my dreams? What tagalong animals—if not birds—would lead me out?
At the first splinter of morning light, from the cave of your mouth flies a song: Hello love. The words pool and lap at my mind, and I can hear an echo in my ear of some vestigial syllable tugging me into consciousness from sleep.
On waking, L appears like manna. Part of our mutual lexicon again, it has been restored to the language. I love you, I say again and again, and you wonder at my exuberance. I locate us on the same map. We share the same longitude and latitude once again. Clasped together through the same long, luminous morning hours, we laugh, we laze, and make love in disheveled sheets, and I can speak your name again. Elise, I say; you’re all liquid in my mouth.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 6.
Sarah Giragosian is the author of the poetry collection Queer Fish, a winner of the American Poetry Journal Book Prize (Dream Horse Press, 2017) and The Death Spiral (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). The craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, which is co-edited by Sarah and Virginia Konchan, is forthcoming from The University of Akron Press. Sarah’s writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Ecotone, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.
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