ISSUE NINE: "A Breathing Lake" by Sarah Maclay

A Breathing Lake

Above us, floating in the dark
like opened lanterns—

as the water’s onyx sheen
closes to opaque:

lotuses, where stars would be.

How we wanted to eat them
with our eyes.

How we almost did.

So much closer now that we could almost pull them
toward us like austere balloons.

All around, our stillness, our suspension.

Sarah mclay

Sarah Maclay’s new poetry collection,  Nightfall Marginalia, is due out from What Books Press in 2023. Previous collections include Music for the Black Room, Whore, The White Bride, and, with Holaday Mason, a braided collaboration called The “She” Series: A Venice Correspondence, as well as several chapbooks and a short theatre piece, “Fugue States Coming Down the Hall.” She is a winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and a recipient of a City of LA Master Artist Fellowship, a Yaddo residency, and a Pushcart Special Mention. Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 to the Present,  The Laurel Review, Blackbird, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, Tupelo Quarterly, Manoa, Hotel Amerika, Poetry International, where she served as Book Review Editor for a decade, and beyond. She teaches creative writing and literature at Loyola Marymount University and mini-master classes at Beyond Baroque.

Headshot: Sarah Maclay

Photo Credit: Staff