Scavenging firewood between storms, we find a pile
of unsplit oak the town left behind. The chipper
will be here tomorrow. I use my foot to push aside
a log almost too rotted to take, roll it toward our truck
anyway—until I see a white-footed mouse
tucked in one of its grooves, black eyes all pupil
as she tries to decide whether to jump or stay.
She backs in further, out of sight. So we lift the trunk
like a treasure, nestle it like fine sculpture in a corner
of the truck bed. At home, we unload the mouse log,
carry it like medics bearing a stretcher, and set it down
between two arbor vitae, a name that means tree of life,
a kind of tree we have in our yard, but also a structure
we carry in our cerebellum, a word that means little brain.
We have mice in our walls. No one can tell us how
to get them out alive before closing up the holes.
When I can’t sleep, I think of the log-mouse
in her wooden burrow, the arbor vitae deep within
her cerebellum. When she dies, I hope she falls
to weather, to age, to tooth or claw. Not poison,
not a trap, not the chipper’s screaming maw.
This poem first appeared in Canary (Fall 2022).
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Brett Warren (she/her) is the author of The Map of Unseen Things (Pine Row Press, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Canary, Cape Cod Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Hole in the Head Review, ONE ART, Pinhole Poetry, and other literary publications. She lives in a house surrounded by pitch pine and black oak trees—nighttime roosts of wild turkeys, who sometimes use the roof of her writing attic as a runway. www.brettwarrenpoetry.com
