Boy Fetching Firewood by James Kangas

Dark eyes peered from the chinks in our woodpile.

Field mice nested there and, white as the fields,

winter weasels with black-tipped tails come for blood,

made you shiver at a glimpsed scurry.

You’d imagine them going for your throat,

little red mouths with Transylvanian teeth,

fat, lethal sausages of clawed and leaping fur.

The spring day I chopped two copper bellies

till the birch was dripping scarlet

and the air pierced with metallic screams, 

I flew to the house, suddenly flashing

to the tale of the crone from the hill: 

One August day, three haymakers  

North of Pohjola stabbed a snake

with a pitchfork and held it

over a flame where it screamed ‘til its skin burst,

and when they flopped it on the ground

and started scything again, they saw 

the stubble all around them seething 

like the writhing locks of Medusa, each tongue 

furious, red-tipped, forked and flickering,

and they started to dance, and they danced 

higher and higher, ‘til the thin air of fear

took their breath, and their hearts stopped.

James Kangas is a retired librarian and musician living in Flint, Michigan. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Faultline, New York Quarterly, Penn Review, West Branch, et al. His chapbook, Breath of Eden (Sibling Rivalry Press) was published in 2019.