"Sheela-na-Gig" by Sonya Taaffe
Today's offering is "Sheela-na-Gig" by Sonya Taaffe, a 2003 Rhysling Award winning poet, first featured in 2024's "Masquerade" WFQ installment.
The holiday season snuck up on us at the WFQ headquarters after a busy Thanksgiving, so please forgive us for missing yesterday's post. A day that starts with a 4am Lyft ride to the Dallas/Fort Worth airport will do that to a ghoul!
Today's offering is something we've been quietly publishing alongside our marquee 500-word Weird Flash: poetry!
This poem first appeared in our latest installment - Masquerade 2024 - where we challenged our storytellers and poets to draft something on the themes of masks, costumes, and disguises. This poem, contributed by 2003 Rhysling Award Winner Sonya Taaffe certainly fit the bill!
Sheela-na-Gig
by Sonya Taaffe
You stripped the oak’s visor
and found me ashen,
peeled cigarette papers of birch
from my elm-streaked hair.
My breasts bared their spangled ivy
to stickle with haws.
Your thumb rubbed off lichen
and rowan beaded to my lips.
You fancied my face
as open to entry
as a lych-gate,
the furrows of myself
each fall of beech-mast feeds.
Under apple, elder,
beneath blackthorn, whitebeam.
I am the wood in which Sweeney’s wits were lost.
Sonya was kind enough to answer some questions for us...
WFQ: What is your favorite weird aspect, character, or story about the holidays?
ST: When I was ten years old and taken for the first time to the Christmas Revels in Boston, I was transfixed by the sun-faces in blue and gold which stood to either side of the stage, because at the downswing of the solstice when the year had ended for the three fools of the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars who were obliged to walk the Broad Road down which Death came to meet them and scythe them down, these smiling coins were turned to reveal black-and-white death's-heads which stared out the audience even while other festivities went on between them and only at the end of the guising, when the Sun masked in ribbons had died with a knot of swords at his throat and the Doctor raised him up again, were the bright gold faces returned and the white skulls hidden out of sight, on the other side of the sun where they belonged and were always waiting. It was a stage trick, ritual magic. I thought of the skull behind the sun for years.
WFQ: Where else have you been published in 2024?
ST: I have had new and reprint fiction and poetry in Not One of Us (#78, #80), Nightmare Magazine (June 2024, September 2024), Strange Horizons (August 2024, October 2024), All in Among the Briars: An Anthology of Mythic Wonder (ed. Julia Rios), and Uncanny Magazine.
WFQ: What was your favorite weird fiction that you read this past year?
ST: It's a dense field, but I was recently impressed by the near-future anarcho-queer splatterfolk-in-verse of Valkyrie Loughcrewe's Crom Cruach (2022).
WFQ: Where can folks follow you online (other than WFQ)?
I'm online at Dreamwidth and Patreon.
Stay tuned for tomorrow's entry in our weird online holiday Adventskalender!