salvation
poetry, summer 2025
In the courtyards and graveyards of God’s Country,
the dead and breathing are looking for rescue. Salvation:
is it inside? A way out? Above or below or a dead
end? It has been one year and nine months since I last spoke
to my mother. It has been two months since the president
declared a “stop work” order on resettlement programs
and left refugees in limbo. The world is slipping
from someone else’s fingers and some of us are marooned
or erased or left to hang on. From the remove
of my window, I can’t tell if I’m seeing a bird
or drone in the distance. Were I a hawk, I’d see
eight times farther than my 20/20 eyes and wouldn’t see
state lines. If I orbited Earth from space, either velcroed
to a wall or somersaulting about, I would see continents
and oceans, and if I timed it right, even Christmas lights.
I’d see the curvature of Earth, but no trace
of boundary or imaginary lines. Imagine explaining empire
to a child; what do you say? My wife,
a French expat, who walks in step with everyone
and will not eat a meal by herself, says that individualism
is the most American thing about me. It betrayed me
today when I walked off, forgetting to wait for her.
Teaching, she says, is a form of waiting, and it’s true:
my student is remaking her mind and has not yet out-
grown her dreams. She requests a meeting to discuss her future.
Of course, I say, though what’s the future to those who must see
through a pinhole to last? And though I’ve never
been to space, I still wish to write poems that inspire
the Overview Effect. I wish to feel dwarfed and drunk
on awe. All I know is this spring I will greet my mother
as crocus. I will water her, and in watering her, I will water
the cancer cells that died with her. In this country,
it’s the season of mass firings, and the EPA predicts more pipeline
ruptures, oil spills, chemical explosions, and nuclear accidents.
Count on more unhoused refugees. The future? It’s in my student’s
open eyes, in her thought bubbles. I want to believe her eyes.
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 writing has appeared in such journals as Orion, Tin House, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches at the University at Albany-SUNY.