written/non-written things by me (from 2005-2008)

Friday, October 14, 2005

A return to space

On the back of my leg there was a tingling. I rubbed at my skin through my cotton pajamas and tried to continue watching the movie. I was sitting slouching in my living room chair in front of my computer screen. The film was in Chinese and required all of my attention. I got up and pulled down my pants in the living room mirror. There was, on the back of my knee a red an intricate whelp, as if I had been lashed by a prickly branch. The door was open. The air came through every so often. It then came rushing through. I walked outside under the tree and looked up as a grey smokey puff was about to over take the moon. Someone approached in the alley, rolling, it sounded, on the gravel. They cast no shadow, no shadow I could see. Half a block visible from my porch a sanitation truck barreled down the boulevard. From the passenger side window hung a single forearm like a limpid wind sock. The smoke had since over taken the moon. I looked back at my house, through the wide open door and through the window whose blinds were turned parallel to the pane. The room was orange with dim lamp light. How the room seemed stewed, or had stew cooking somewhere within heart of the house, with somewhere there must be being a gentle stirring wooden spoon held impassively by a matron. How could this be my warm house, with such invitingness? How could I alone make such a home, a place that if passing in an alley would seem full of couched fed taken care of individuals, a place that fools even me that stew would be cooking there. I looked up and it was overtaken and had since dissipated and the full bright coin exposed. I thought of the language from the movie which still played. How it stirred the trepidation in me and the deep excited need for green hills and a distinct blue line between the hills and the sky. And wide pants and flat shoes. And being alone and unintelligible, until being alone is all I know, and being unintelligible is all I desire. The smokey clouds that broke apart when they passed between me and the moon prodded by a stirring spoon whose handle was so long that everyone held tightly as its splintered cylindrical length protruded into the sky and punctured through city glow and continued past space so cold that I am choked and clasp my throat and return to earth, and fall inevitably back into a chair.

My name is Hannah Pierce-Carlson