The sound of august

(I'm a literary nerd; I study books and love books and one day want to write my own. I'm afraid this blog might get a little littered with some of my favourite examples.)

Cup your hands around the word: August. Press your palms together and slip between the syllables, twist and work your fingers around the letters. Release the first long moan that rises like a supplication from an open throat, like sidewalks shining shimmering in the sun.

Hold this in your mouth before you speak. Taste this word. It's as reverant as a carrot stretching swollen in the ground, full and firm as corn beneath the husk. It's as bitter as beer and trembles in delicious agony like sleep and apples and suspended breath.

Cup your hands around this humming buzzing word with scrabbling fingers, and abandon. Scatter the sounds like dandelion seeds, stubborn and ephemeral as blazing eyes, opened wide and rooted to this newly birthed and fierce, loamy body.


August cannot contain itself. Words and worlds split like pods of promises, over-ripe.


I clawed and caught and hooked my fingers,

cleaved and burst apart and found you,

child of heat and storm, abundance, exultation.

- August Witch by Chandra Mayor