Graffiti

by Sonya Taaffe

       I made my bed between Sappho and Catullus
       watching the moon set, the sparrows fly up at dawn,
       a poem burn itself out at the bottom of a yahrzeit glass.
       A couple at Vulci dreamed out the underworld
       on a lid of nenfro, carved to their marriage-sheets.
       At Pompeii, crushed in the hollows of boiling ash.
       In a thousand years, not even the walls remember
       who loved, who fucked, for how much, so long ago,
       not even the coins I dropped to pay for your memory,
       a candle into the last of the wine.

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Poems and short stories by Sonya Taaffe have won the Rhysling Award, been shortlisted for the SLF Fountain Award and the Dwarf Stars Award, and been reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, The Best of Not One of Us, and Trochu divné kusy 3. A selection of her work has been collected in Postcards from the Province of Hyphens and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books). She is presently 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.

Photography: Amphorae, Pompeii, by Jayegirl99.