Sarah Maclay

 

The Singing

Because the halo has descended
to your hips
                  as light
                                     on the horizon
the sky around your head
closes in

in green—
             moody muddy green—

and your feet are the size
of small fingers

             somehow on the ground
                                     where you stand—
voluminous

             billowing

in a black as soft as clouds

below the flower—

             the bow—

                         in your hair
 
blooming as large as a face

             before the rain
             before the evening

                         while the hill is still touching
                         your thigh
 
 
Sarah Maclay is the author of Nightfall Marginalia, forthcoming from What Books Press in 2023, and four prior collections, most recently, a braided collaboration with Holaday Mason: The “She” Series: A Venice Correspondence. A recipient of The Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and a Pushcart Special Mention, her work has been supported by Yaddo and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles. Book Review Editor of Poetry International for a decade, her poems and criticism have also appeared in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The Best American Erotic Poetry: 1800 to the Present, among others.