Whale Fall

After the aftershock on the ocean floor,
after the windfall of whale fall,
rattail fish & stone crabs, hagfish
& bristleworms snag a place
at the banquet & tuck into thickets
of flesh, sloughing off bits
and binging on the belly
             until—defleshed— the bones attract
bone-devourers, zombie worms
that suck & scour
the balustrade of rib cage to brightness.

This is how I’d like to go:
as a landscape cracked open,
 or a city sprawling with feeders, the bulk of all
my history trimmed down
to nutrient-rich meat.                 

I won’t be a ghost, another cover-up
for the economies of death,
             but the crux of matter:
a threshold to power for another.

                        Mouthfuls of me in everybody,      


             I could be any body.

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). Her craft anthology, Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems, co-edited with 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.

Published July 15 2023