Poetry by Natalie Giarratano

Krystian Olszanski CC




We Could Break Forever

I scan our shared spaces for the cylindrical mouths 
singing their grotesque white god song about dis-
membered fetuses and unidentifiable grade schoolers. 
But I will not turn my poems to ash for gunshot 
choruses while our kids turn to stone in dark classrooms 
or forget that beauty matters: the rippling sheen of a horse’s 
muscled haunch or my daughter pointing at the bluest fish 
jumping out of the pinkest water in a painting. I know how 
easily we could break forever. Keep playing at ghosts in malls, 
theaters, grocery stores. Become a fucking nest of apparitions. 
For so goddam long, we’ve recklessly othered and forgotten 
the true skin of terrorism, which has always been the color of 
privilege. We have to fly down from the moon now. Flock 
back to this gutted country. Show up with our throats shining.



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Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Waxwing, McNeese Review, Superstition Review, and Whale Road Review, among others. Originally from rural southeast Texas, she edits and lives in Fort Collins, CO, and was the city’s 2018-2020 poet laureate.