Threshold

The last leaf refuses falling, bronze-veined, curled at its edges, holding to a branch that remembers summer.

Below, the earth splits open with frost— small fissures spreading like a child's map to somewhere it doesn't want to go.

I stand between the warm and cold, my breath visible now, a ghost of itself, and the birds have all learned a new language.

Silence tastes like iron and honey, the kind that fills the gaps between heartbeats, where everything that was becomes what waits.