Beckoning
Sarah Cannavo
I don’t sleep much anymore, and
I’m starting to think the woods
are to blame.
Something in them is calling me, waking
an ache that won’t subside as I
lie in bed twisting the sheets in my
fists and listening
to the whispers of the branches at
my window, something—but what,
but what? And why is this unknown
so beguiling?
Because its call coils around my
restless limbs like vines, tugging
incessantly, and every time I close
my eyes I see the green-black mouth
of the woods yawning open for me,
wider and wider every night. It speaks
in the shifting of the leaves, the rustle
of the grass, the step
of something unseen passing through the
bracken, and though it’s a foreign
tongue to me I somehow know it’s
calling me home—and I know,
one of these nights, I’m going to
follow it.
Sarah Cannavo is a writer of prose and poetry haunting southern New Jersey. Her poems and short stories have appeared in anthologies and magazines such as Schlock! Horror!, Liminality, Horror USA: California, Deranged, Obliquatur Voluptas, Ghosts, Spirits, and Specters, Star*Line, Ghost Stories For Starless Nights, The Society of Misfit Stories, Hookman and Friends, and The Cryptid Chronicles; her poems “Fallen But Not Down” and “Learning the Way” were nominated for a 2020 and 2021 Rhysling Award, respectively. Her story “Unreality” and novella Wolf of the Pines are available now on Amazon. She’s occasionally been known to post on her site www.moodilymusing.blogspot.com, and she’s been sighted tweeting @moodilymusing