A Literary Arts Journal
Sarah Maclay’s most recent release is The “She” Series: A Venice Correspondence (What Books Press), a braided collaboration with Holaday Mason. She is currently completing a fifth full-length collection of poetry, and she teaches at LMU.
These prose poems, which first emerged as experiments in OuLiPo, interrupted ekphrasis, and an aesthetic argument with a sestina that redeploys its end-words, all appear in her second full-length collection, The White Bride (U of Tampa Press). “More Soonest” was first published in The Laurel Review; “Always Another Tonight” in mid)rib.
Her current social media platform is Facebook.
You can contact her at uncorsage@verizon.net.
Always Another Tonight
Slow, blind, open—drifting sticks, sugar, hands—and even a kind of drowning is a mystery to the body, a train slipping into soot. After a decade of cash and ashes, far from the nostalgic dead—fingers slipping, the raw pillar, legs, the final harsh, abandoned whinny—a kind of proof, right here: not past, not lost, not ghost. Here, in this very pew, time is dust, is broken. The old night is grass. Turn your head. Look at me. Let us not be “the figures.”
Obbligato
It’s frazzling as a spectral calypso through the pampas, my pale palomino. I’m drenched—but I deteriorate. One whiff of your mug, laddie, and I low. How about a minesweeper to get me through this overture of rubble? Stirfry up a bit of ivory—I mean ivy. Utter an artichoke or two, as your opulent gramophone pleads with my heartland and I waver snazzily as we dine. Dirty the pitcher. Watch me sweat as you evade. Evict me from my doves, pal—we’ll evolve.
More Soonest
Something happened. And it blurred. And someone is pounding at the door. We’re off-center. Not composed. Composed. Not at rest. I think someone was screaming. There was a door. And the figures were moving. Something was wrong. Couldn’t see them. Couldn’t see them clearly. Something about “wild hair.” Something that looks like an animal. Or a fish. Maybe an octopus. And them—rushing for the door. Two. A bed. A cot. There was a kind of sound I didn’t want to hear. What we are doing is necessary. It all happened near the door. Someone was trying to leave. We’re not what you think. Or they were about to lift the door. It was where the pillow would be. Giving it all their weight. But the bed had no ending. Simple, really. Had there been a mural on the brick. It was blurry. He was wearing tennis shoes and a belt. Long ago. He was wearing nothing but white. Maybe the paint had been sprayed off. It was black and white. Maybe the paint had been sprayed off.
Or they were pulling it shut.
Faizah Ahmad Rajput is a visual artist and poet living in Los Angeles, Ca. She is currently working on her first book of poetry at Otis College of Art and Design, where she is as an MFA candidate in writing.
The background drawing here is part of a larger body of work, a series of one-minute freehand sketches of Faizah's sleeping experiences next to her person. The drawings will accompany the dream poems, which are the resulting products of those nights.
She is on most social media platforms.
If you are interested in collaborations, you can contact her at