The Breath Before Snow

The trees exhale a final rustle,

a sound like paper surrendering,

each leaf cracking in slow motion

as it loosens its grip.

Gold flutters into brown,

and brown into nothing,

until the ground is a quilt

stitched by the wind’s restless hand.

Branches bare themselves,

thin and rigid as bones,

their silhouettes cutting black veins

against the pallid sky.

They reach not upward but sideways,

like fingers searching for warmth,

and finding only the hollow air.

The air itself has sharpened.

Each breath is glass against the throat,

a clean ache,

the kind that wakes you without mercy.

The nose stings with smoke

curling from chimneys,

the promise of fires behind doors

you will never open.

Somewhere, someone is stirring a pot —

you can almost taste it:

spices that linger like memory,

fat and salt blooming on the tongue.

Yet beneath it all

is the faint metallic tang of snow,

not yet here,

but pacing at the edge of the horizon,

patient as a hunter.

Beneath your steps

the earth sings brittle.

Leaves layered with a skin of frost

splinter like sugared glass.

Each step shatters a season —

not autumn, not winter,

but a fragile seam between.

The sound is uncertain,

like a voice breaking,

caught between youth and silence.

A crow rises from the stubble field,

its wings scissoring the sky.

Its call, raw and singular,

is pulled quickly away,

swallowed in the cold,

as if echoes cannot survive

this thinning air.

The light too is different.

It does not fall —

it retreats.

Amber gives way to iron.

Shadows stretch lean and sharp,

their edges honed as if by steel.

The sun is tired of its own heat,

and withdraws early,

leaving a hush that grows heavier each night.

You feel the season most in the body.

Tongue tastes metal on the lips.

Fingers ache and retreat

into the refuge of pockets.

Shoulders hunch by instinct,

the frame bracing for storms unseen.

The body recognizes the shift

before the mind will admit it:

the world has tilted.

And yet, for a breath,

there is beauty in the doubling.

The orchard still holds fruit,

but the branches shiver.

The earth smells of rot and harvest,

but also of salt and absence.

Half fire, half ice.

Half feast, half hunger.

The threshold hums with both,

balanced for a moment

before release.

You stand still.

The wind runs a hand across your face.

And in that second,

you know:

this is the hinge of the year,

the quiet turning,

the last exhale before snow.