As if through glass, through windows, in a café, in the afternoon or early evening, in June, in June or November, month like a fetish of gray—a month of water hanging onto itself; until it drizzles, a month of dulled light—he is seen for a moment, accidentally, between appointments, in the middle of errands, walking down steps, the cement steps, say, of an old bank—old enough for granite, for columns—pulling his keys out of his pocket, or gripping the small black remote that replaces keys (which you can't hear the sound of, behind all this glass), and approaching his car, so that for an instant you see his face unguarded—or as unguarded as you will see it—and you try to memorize it, but it's too fleeting, so that now only the back of his head, and maybe the veins in his arms that you memorized before (the way his fingers go, his shirt)—or the waiter comes, the waiter comes by and asks if you've decided, the waiter comes by and asks if you've made up your mind—
but this is the opposite of confession.
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Sarah Maclay's first book, Whore, won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of three limited edition chapbooks- Shadow of Light, Ice from the Belly and Weeding the Duchess. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Writer's Chronicle, Ninth Letter, ZYZZYVA, and many other publications, including Poetry International, for which she serves as book review editor.
"Grille" was published in her collection titled The White Bride.
