The Wearing Season
by Sonya Taaffe
Sonya Taaffe's short stories and poems have appeared in such venues as Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry, Here, We Cross: A Collection of Queer and Genderfluid Poetry from Stone Telling, People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, Last Drink Bird Head, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, and The Best of Not One of Us. Her work can be found in the collections Postcards from the Province of Hyphens and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books) and A Mayse-Bikhl (Papaveria Press). She is currently on the editorial staff of Strange Horizons; she holds master's degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object.
You know as well as I the weight of autumn,
an old coat with a stranger's torn threads in the seams,
its inside pocket tucked with a photograph
of our faces, as wet and wavering as ghosts.
Shrug it off, it settles like damp leaves,
spider-beaded in a shivering dawn,
its smell the blank of three o'clock desk-light
and boiled-out tea, string sticking to the mug.
We smother in it, breathing memory,
a rising damp of time.
Or stand in shirtsleeves, cold as winter trees,
our shadows staring in the thin bright sun.
January 25th, 2013