Ecosystem and Charm against Ice
by
Sarah Giragosian
Ecosystem
The third day the wildfires turned the sun
cryptic, I stay inside, my eyes burning.
Sunless, you leave me a smattering of Black-Eyed
Susans nodding in their vase to look at
while you’re gone. Burning and molting
season have synced up, it seems, and the blue-
birds, peering through the windows, look
bedraggled. We live in the stolen territory
of the Seneca people, on the hip of the Chemung River,
in the country of nectar and pre-polluted newborns.
These days, I’m on edge, but tender too,
like a cattail split in two. Remind me, love, how
to be; I’m harmonized to interrupted laughter
and bird song that freezes midair because my country
made me so. Between us, I’m lost in a dream
state of apple pie and ICE purges and though I try
to stay clear of a certain American smile
and its theater of white teeth, I discover it on myself
when I’m posing for a smart phone. Only when
I’m safe with you do I let fly the howls
held inside me. We’re two women at night
studying the madwoman’s dictionary, and from
you I learn to listen to a chorus of crickets,
to consider how each is born with her
own signature song. We inhabit some myths,
let others go, but we free ourselves when
we name them. See also empire, see also amnesia,
see also capitalism. At night we dip our hearts
in the wide river of the cosmos and try not to forget
all the stars tucked behind the ears of the Sun,
even when she disappears, knowing that plants
and planets far older than us stitched their lives
to it. And there are invisible nerves that tether us
together. Saturn does not recant her rings. Kestrels
don’t renounce their wings, and once the sight of a seagull
meant hope to sailors after months at sea.
And the pine coning of the white pine’s
future kin rely on wind to disperse. Strawberries
survive on bees. And us? We are what makes us—
wound and trees, the grave in my head
that my mother (dead two years) won’t enter, the poison
and river, and your arms, my cardinal points forever.
Charm Against ICE
Squint Chaos,
its misfiring brain,
down to size.
The first lesson of fascism: to kill a Hydra,
chop off his heads, burn his neck,
twist off his fingers,
create a ward of his bones
And stay away from
my wife
my students
my friends
my people
Shrivel to a puddle
A dribble cannot steal people
or pillage whole families
A dribble is not poison
It has no lethal force
or proximity to life
It is the drool of a sweating
dollar in the pocket
of a king whose rein
is stretching thinner
than a fraying leash
and is at this moment
reverting back
to lint to ash to less