Carousel
Sarah Cannavo
If I could
go back in time—
grab that current
and ride it
like a painted fairground horse
while hours,
days, weeks whirled by
like the lights of
the rides around it,
stretching taffy-like out into
candy-colored streaks
so close
I can almost grab them—
I’d do it,
run that calliope backwards
until I reached a time
before it all fell apart,
while the world still
gleamed and glimmered
and music and laughter
still filled the night
and happiness
was as simple and perfect
as a ride on a
painted horse, back to a time
when you still smiled.
Sarah Cannavo is a writer of prose and poetry living in southern New Jersey. Her poems and short stories have appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Carrying On, Untimely Frost, Parody, Poetry Quarterly, Postcards From the Void, Schlock! Horror!, Darkling’s Beasts and Brews, The Devil’s Hour, It Came From the Garage!, The Literary Hatchet, Liminality, Horror USA: California, Deranged, Obliquatur Voluptas, Ghosts, Spirits, and Specters, Midnight in the Witch’s Kitchen, Star*Line, Ghost Stories For Starless Nights, The Society of Misfit Stories, The Devil the You Know, and Hookman and Friends; her poem “The 5 Stages of Being on Hold” won third place in the 2018 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest and her poem “Fallen But Not Down” was nominated for a 2020 Rhysling Award. Her short work will appear in the upcoming anthology Horror USA: Washington, and her story “Unreality” was recently published by Alban Lake Press as an ebook. Other projects include doing her best to finish her current novel-in-progress and keeping up a five-year streak of daily poems. When she’s not working on these and other projects, she sometimes manages to blog about these and other projects on her site, The Moody Muse (www.moodilymusing.blogspot.com) or rant about them on Twitter @moodilymusing.