Valentine’s Day

White chicken

Attached to a tree
At neck and legs
With string

Sarah Maclay is the author of three poetry collections-Music for the Black Room, Whore, and The White Bride (all from University of Tampa Press), and three chapbooks. Her poetry and critical prose appears in American Poetry Review, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing and literature at Loyola Marymount University.

*Photo courtesy of Adnan Yahya.

Our Lady of Wrong Lyrics

He demands, the landlord, pugnacious, with strangely cut hair

(as though cut in clumps and darkened) that she write the lyrics
for his musical (in which some biblical back story/message
is …

Our Lady of the Locusts

I had thought for many years

that they were birds.

That she gathered sticks

for firewood, carried like long poles

across the center of her body.

That she dressed in black

habitually. Passing other stacks

of sticks …