Weather!

Sarah Maclay’s poems, reviews and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, FIELD, Hotel Amerika, The Writer’s Chronicle, Solo, Pool, ZZYZYVA, lyric, Runes, Cider Press Review and numerous other publications including Poetry International, where she currently serves as book review editor. New work is forthcoming in Ninth Letter and The Journal. Her debut collection, Whore, received the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and was released in 2004. She was also a winner of the dA Center for the Arts Poetry Prize, a finalist for the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry and a semi-finalist for the Kenyon Review Poetry Prize (Zoo Press), the Cleveland State University Poetry Prize and the Tupelo Press First Book Prize, and she recently received a Pushcart nomination. Last summer she appeared as a “first books” panelist at the Napa Valley Writers Conference. The author of three chapbooks, Ice from the Belly (Farstarfire press), Shadow of Light (Inevitable Press) and Weeding the Duchess (Black Stone Press), she also co-edited the anthology Echo 6 8 1 for Beyond Baroque, where she has been a poet in residence. A Montana native, she received degrees from Oberlin College and Vermont College, worked in the film and software industries, and has most recently been teaching writing in Los Angeles at USC and FIDM, as well as conducting workshops both privately and, periodically, at Beyond Baroque.

feminine, winter, cold When the blue shadows pull themselves across the hills and white sinks into twilight— the blue snow of twilight— there is an illusion of beginning: here, where the field intersects the sky beyond the fence; where the crystals slowly scurry from the firs. It is a foreign house. There is nothing to unpack. It is not yet night and the day, with its covered mouth that refused to talk— that day is gone: it is a blessing. Let it be a blessing. Let the fir branches softly shake their snow: soft as plumes, soft as ostrich feathers.