[Julie Steiner]

This one's on p. 30 of Maryann's Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter, also from Able Muse Press (2013). A publisher we are all supporting because it hosts Eratosphere for us. Right? Right? Anyway:

Paint Store

Stand there, stunned and gawking, before these altars,
walls of flapping prayer-flags with names like poems.
What might happen? Glamours and transformations.
Pasts disappearing:

teal, vermilion, ultramarine. You drink them,
suck them in like opiates. Choose them wildly.
Wield them. Then the walls in your head might crack their
cipher of blankness—

Choice, though. Walling in at a single vision.
Sinking in it. Painting it into corners.
Once, you did it: namings and nursery colors.
Emily. Yellow.

Now you think of walk-throughs. Of thinner spirits
shrinking from the force of these saturated
indigos and corals. A sift of ashfall.
Shifting to neutrals,

selling out to selfless release, you settle.
Beige and cream serenity. Light. Satori.
Hand the palette over and stare away to
ceiling-white absence.


The excellent "Weather Radio" on pp. 48-49 of Credo is also in Sapphics.
See also "Tattoo and Piercing Parlor," p. 14 of (Breath Control, David Robert Books, 2012).
"Asparagus," p. 34, "Collision," p. 65; "Iconography," p. 92.