Synaesthesia Magazine Atlas | Page 45

/ LeighAnna Schesser A Sip of September is Yellow I met him in the month with days of homemade paper, soft and thin and sweet. We tucked late afternoons, soaked in mellow lemon sunsets, between its pages. Smudged treelines; ochre dusks; lightning above the river. There was a lone yellow tree and a horizon of cottonwoods, leaves winking and sinking, singing in shimmer and shadow. One by one, I borrowed all his fountain pens, wrote sacred words on scraps of vellum. Sip September slowly, he told me, or it’ll go to your head. I kissed him then, under the warm belly of a storm-blushed sky. Rising redfruit suns promised days and days, margins to meet; Indian summer low and lingering, fading at the edge of the pier. The river deepened and tickled the stones. We hungered for the flavor of chilling air. Savor September, he told me. The month of yellow may never come again. LeighAnna Schesser graduated with an M.F.A. in poetry from North Carolina State University. In 2013 , she was a finalist in the North Carolina State poetry contest judged by Michael Wiegers. Her work is forthcoming in Transcendence Magazine in 2015.