Cartography
Sarah Cannavo
This world is not the one he knows,
but he sets off to know it all the
same. Daily he lets himself be devoured
to learn the differences between home
and here; swallowed alive by the
woods he walks them, tracing their
ways and trapping them with ink
and paper so they can’t change on him,
soaking up the silence and birdsong and
sunlight and shadows of this place
to fill the empty hours, the yawning
hole in his heart. His head buzzes
as branches snap beneath his boots, the
landmarks and paths of another land,
another life, trying to overlay themselves
on those of this, two worlds warring
in his mind and memories—of course
sanity’s the first casualty. Still he
goes out, still he wanders and charts
his surroundings, still he searches for
a way to connect what was with what
is, the path that will bring him home to
the happiness he’s denied here.
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 The Cryptid Chronicles. She sometimes manages to write about these and other projects on her site, The Moody Muse (www.moodilymusing.blogspot.com) or rant about them on Twitter @moodilymusing.