Four Poems

Jeremy Stacy

The window was open,

warm air drifting in.

Two voices above me

on the second-floor balcony,

talking as if the night

had nowhere else to be.

I stayed in bed,

the room dark.

Just listened.

Couldn’t make out everything—

fragments landing,

dissolving before I could hold them:

an argument about politics,

voices overlapping,

a name I didn’t recognize.

I let it continue.

Didn’t close the window.

Didn’t move.

They never knew I was there.

The conversation carried on

without me.

That was enough.

Hazard, After

My aunt went back to Hazard

years after the flood—

trash still caught in the bends of the road,

plastic braided into fences,

things that should have moved on

still holding on like we do.

We remembered when

coal trucks were overfilled—

a tarp strapped overhead

to keep in the haul.

I thought it the norm—

my dad filled up his truck every day,

men gone for weeks,

the road taking more

than it ever gave back.

My grandpa worked

until he didn’t—

six days a week, Sundays stretched

on the couch in pajamas,

a Natural Light sweating on the table,

NASCAR murmuring on the TV,

grandkids rolling toy cars on the floor beside him,

then back again

until the diagnosis settled in his head—

another thing the flood

couldn’t wash out.

The Mountain Parkway stretched farther now—

fewer trucks,

the road quieter

than I remember.

A pale green thread drifts in the wind,

rootless, searching—

thin as a lie, hungry as winter.

It finds the stem of something solid

and begins to climb—

tendrils tightening like fingers

finally allowed to touch.

She mimics my chemistry,

speaks in sugar and electricity,

a daughter wearing a green mask.

Haustoria sink into my veins.

No reciprocity—only sap taken,

no shade given.

The orange, leafless tangle

becomes a witch-hair shroud

strangling the blackberry bush.

Once attached, she severs her roots.

My pulse becomes her lifeline.

She grafts her hollow hunger

onto my strength.

I remain in the dark,

peering through a keyhole,

while she burns

orange and ravenous.

Black Iron Lung

It squats in the corner like an anchor—

black-ribbed, unyielding,

a heavy geometry of iron.

To me it is a black iron lung.

It draws in the world’s bituminous panic,

filters the grit,

and exhales anthracite warmth.

Soot thick in my throat—

I stomach it at last.

I pull on thick leather gloves,

a hide barrier against the heat’s liability,

and reach for the brass coil.

The wire gives with a springy heartbeat

before the true weight of the iron takes over.

I yank the lever—

a gritty, metal-on-metal groan—

turning the act of opening the furnace

into ritual containment.

A harbor

where other people’s chaos is mastered.

Sentience is the anthracite I shovel in—

heavy, inherited malediction.

It warms the room

but leaves my hands stained black.

Now the iron wakes with a tock-tock,

expanding, contracting,

bleeding the sulfuric choke of swallowed pride

slow through the ash-caked mica.

Inside, a phantom flicker—

the illusion of fire burning in shadow.

The heat lingers long after the coal dies to a whisper,

a dull bruised red that refuses to let the room go cold.

I feel the throb of resentment through the iron—

the furnace-born slump of steel.

I have learned how to hold the ash

until the sun finds the garden.