HILARY LAYNE writes fiction and nonfiction and also publishes long form video essays on Youtube on the subjects of storytelling and the cultural decay of fiction. Her channel is called The Second Story. Her website is here.

IT IS NOT ALWAYS THE HUNTER WHO CONSUMES

My beloved Hunter,

pursuit throws silk across my path

which I run barefoot and already

blood and honey-soaked.

And you, half-wild with hunger.

White clay from my soft belly

clings to brambles and tells you

how to find me. My oil blood

waits like a whispered dare

for the spark of your blade.

My beloved Hunter

where is the tender violence of

your metal when I most need it?

I flee not to escape you but

to feel the warmth of your pursuit

on the back of my neck,

to feel my hair comb through

your grasping fingers; to hear

the air tremble with the

violence of your pounding heart.

And, on the banks of the uncrossable river,

when the hunt bleeds its last pleasure,

I will stop and turn, eager to feel

at last the sharp release

of your victory.

HOW TO FEED A SLEEPING FOREST

The cottage, I have said, is your heart.

What is your heart if not the gilded chamber

of the bound soul? Bound, I have said, by the forest.

Look: much of the sky is a distant memory,

---

a song sung in faraway light by lonely stars

aching for one another across unsurpassable voids.

What do we do with their songs? What can we do

but be silent and listen? How much of our existence

---

can be described as this? this obligation to witness.

(The forest, I have said, is a witness.)

There is a box in your chest. A knot of bark,

woven with sinew and nerves. It is there

---

you must put these things, not in your heart.

The forest of trees is witness, guardian

To your heart which is the cottage in which you live

in which the soul is housed in her gilded chamber.

---

(The box, I have said, is a fire.)

Into this fire you will cast the pain that is

essential. Grief, for example, and small parcels of regret

bound in ribbons of guilt. These things you must

---

burn in the fire. Then you may look out through

the windows of your cottage and see

how the glow of that fire lights the forest.

By no other light could the forest

---

count the branches on its trees or the birds

nested there. By no other light could the forest

see the cottage all aglow and the soul resting there.

(The soul, I have said, is you.)

FALLEN

I was woken by a whisper of snow

which defied the pearlescent sun and

the warmth of the earlier week and

touched the honeyed earth. A kiss.

But with the wetness of tears.

Poetry was read in the white light of it.

Tragic verse, blood-dipped, laced with love.

At night I slept with words I had written

on the edges of my mind and they bled

into my dreams, made them strange and

beautiful and unbearably unfamiliar.

Crows spotted white-frosted fields.

They paced stoically, as if – I think,

still wrapped in the fabric of the poem –

keeping watch over sacred goings-on

which have been hidden from me by

the sudden burst of cold. As if

some great thing has suffered an

unexpected injury and the world

was devoting all its energy

to saving it.

I searched the cottage for him, to ask him

what has happened, to explain to me

the feeling of serene dread which has

pressed upon my chest. But he was not there.

So I sat with a cup of black coffee

on the bench by the kitchen window.

The crows went on pacing, ever vigilant.

The threadbare blanket of gray

stretched across the sky

battled the sun.

I sat and I waited

for him to return.

I waited.

I wait.