Sappho with violets in your smile,
why lie awake counting the Pleiades?
Why pace the grey shore
with the sea hissing of lost lovers
when my arms are warmer than the white of waves,
the sweet and sharp of your skin like Pramnian wine?
Come here to me and I will leave my husband dreaming,
the stars to circle in the wandering sky.
My hair darkens in the shadow of your hand,
but yours blooms silver, shining like the foam
of the morning you leap, not ageless, singing,
from that bright cliff of days.
Sonya Taaffe’s short fiction and poetry can be found in the collections Postcards from the Province of Hyphens (Prime Books), Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books), and A Mayse–Bikhl (Papaveria Press), and in anthologies including Aliens: Recent Encounters, Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, The Moment of Change: An Anthology of Feminist Speculative Poetry, People of the Book: A Decade of Jewish Science Fiction & Fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, and The Best of Not One of Us. She is currently senior poetry editor at Strange Horizons; she holds master’s degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object. She lives in Somerville with her husband and two cats.
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