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  • Tyrian Purple
  • Niamh Corcoran (bio)

Degraded by color, a dye makerplugs in a dirty businessin a dye shop at the city's limits,

rending matter from blood, root,mollusk, stone, fixing dyeswith salt air or stale piss to stain

fabrics for priests and kings. He scoursMediterranean coastlines, gatherssea mussels to slur on masters' backs,

draped in elemental chroma the commoncannot wear. Hands go numbfrom breaking open shells, crushing

soft bodies to extract bloom,clear fluid, alchemist's spunk,adopting bruise and blemish

until its purple fix made radiant.Countless bodies for an ounce.Hands, stained that disembodied shade,

release the mussels' sea pulsing throats,leave the shores a wreck of shells,grammar of unmaking, the color of loss. [End Page 66]

Niamh Corcoran

Niamh Corcoran holds an MFA from American University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, The Los Angeles Review, Southword, Third Coast, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an individual artist grant in poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council.

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