4X2
an online poetry journal
Photo by Melissa Hotchkiss
Hazards After Dark
by Hillery Stone
If you’re going to break a hole in the wall
you’ve got to do it soon. The mouse has left its trail
on the table along the woodgrain
where it roved all night, corpulent and dimple-backed
as a yam. There isn’t much to be found
but you’ve sealed every crack in the house and now
it can't get out. So unlike a mouse
the exterminator says, circling the room.
He takes out his rubber cement
and lies down by the radiator. There was a time
before this house, miles of world
and not a thing of it yours. There were years
you ruined everything good
because the outcome was incalculable.
Now you remind yourself about the shortened life span
of an animal in captivity.
You nose around for hazards after dark—
faint odor, electric hum. Not a particular organism
or object in a specified circumstance
but the unseeable. The stealth design. Now
they’re getting closer. They’re closing in. The whole place
has shrunk to the size of your table, smooth
as a map, ringed with secrets of our genes
and ancient climate. When you can’t find your body
it will be there at the end, posed
for equanimity, signing interminable forms.
Remembering the tastes of the outside.
How It Began
by Hillery Stone
Alone in the San Juan mountains I scaled the dark,
feeling in the sandstone and the snow
and the metal along the rails of the aerial lifts the hands
of my prospector, their pursuit
and girth, I’d loved them for seven years and felt them
only twice, but I could conjure them like a hymn,
like the sounds during childbirth invoked
to counter pain. In the mineral belt, on the volcanic field,
I heard every directive from the Earth’s stage:
thou shalt not keep
any messages; thou shalt not save
a single call. Inside, a new story shook
into being. Like Scheherazade who pulled her yarn of tales
long after dusk, hours after sex transfixed
her body and lay it out
for death. But death kept not coming, instead
a strange root began to grow between her
and the murderous king, at first
grotesque, then useful, then unequivocally desired.
Poet's Statement: I was preoccupied for a while by a persistent mouse that stalked my apartment. I tried various live-capture traps. Sometimes I'd see its shadow. I thought about the particular dread of invasion, which has its own category in the biology of fear, and how, in pursuing each other each night, the mouse and I became intimates.
Looking at these poems together, I see that both carry the threat of death. One that night after night does not come.
Bio: Hillery Stone's poems and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Shenandoah, Green Mountains Review, Electric Literature and on the Academy of American Poets site, poets.org. She has been the recipient of a Gulf Coast Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Adrienne Rich Prize from Beloit Journal. She lives in Brooklyn.