49

Come: be gentian. Emerald.
 Any color in light…
—Stephany Prodromides

Necessaire: albedo. The white, bouncing light. Necessary: snow. In large
patches. What had been forgotten: it is every hue. Now that the happy
ending had been abandoned, we could re-enter the room. Every hue was
present. Every part of light. What is purity anyway, but a moment
Maybe this one.

This one, beyond the strictures of white—of white misconstrued,
misunderstood, of white reduced to paint instead of crystal, to something
opaque, flattened beyond the turning point.

Every hue is welcome.  
This one, the moment after giving up all hope

—all projection. So that the light can project
onto you.






Click here to listen to Sarah Maclay reading "49"






Sarah Maclay’s newest release is Music for the Black Room (UT Press). Her poems and criticism have appeared in APR, Ploughshares, FIELD, The Writer’s Chronicle, Poetry Daily, VerseDaily, The Best American Erotic Poems:  1800 to the Present, Poetry International (where she serves as book review editor), and elsewhere. The recipient of a Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXI, a 2009 Grisham fellowship, and the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, she teaches at LMU and conducts workshops at The Ruskin and Beyond Baroque.