Bedtime Call

The plains are lonely tonight,
But not the mountains.
The whippoorwill keeps me company
Singing our song back and forth.

My dad calls coyote howls “hay-hoos”.
Says they’re monsters that eat little girls
Who play in the woods after dark.
But the hay-hoos are my friends,
Just like the whippoorwills.

The sun soon starts her slumber.
The howls begin quiet,
Then my whippoorwill friend
Stops answering our song.

The porch light flickers.

By: April Rose

April Rose grew up in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas, and her work often reflects the quiet nostalgia of having an entire national forest as a childhood playground. Her father taught her to use the sounds of dusk—the calls of animals drifting through the trees—as a signal that it was time to head home from a day spent exploring the woods. She developed a special fondness for the “dangerous” creatures of the forest, from small grass snakes to lizards, and for the hay-hoos that ushered her home each evening. After moving to the East Coast following college, she found that writing about the mountains became her way of managing homesickness and staying connected to the landscape that shaped her.