THE WITCH AWAKENS

THE WITCH AWAKENS, by Julie Shiel

 

Rain lost its sound that day

and the churning Autumn skies

fell silent

as I stood gazing into the dark

facing that sulfurous breeze.

 

The harvest feast was upon us

and the first frost kissed the grass

when I felt her eyes searching

across that dread dreamscape,

our death foretold in her

ancient and numinous dreams.

 

Our rituals can’t save us.

Mantras from dusty tomes

won’t hold that vengeful crone.

All our dark talismans

won’t stay the call of an owl

gliding from the witch’s house

escaped from her gilded cage.

 

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Julie Shiel lives in Maryland with a ginger feline fluffball and a dilute tortie that keeps him in line. She has  a pair of crows named Zoltan and Zelda that visit her daily just to tease the cats. Her work appears in issues of Strange Horizons, Space & Time Magazine, Eye To The Telescope, Penumbric and others. When not writing she grows a moon garden and communes with her local murder.

Karen Menzel earned an MFA in Creative Writing: Popular Fiction from the University of Southern Maine. She teaches and mentors students at Iowa State University and Western Technical College. She serves as the Assistant Editor of the Pseuodopod Horror Podcast Magazine. She is the 2016 recipient of the Horror Writers Association Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Scholarship. Her poems, short stories and novellas appear in more than 40 publications and her first novel, SWIFT FOR THE SUN, debuted from Dreamspinner Press in 2017.