Land’s got an uncanny sense of our lives’ conflagration. Down the road they have their towered cakes, their landscapes and packed cities, we have Centralia. Our bootlegged mines of anthracite, metered readings, pipes hot above the washboard reasonless. Any moment, sinkholes, and some of us who once had homes, now they’re stories beneath the ground. Architecture wants to gut itself and start over. There are days we do the same. We know the numbers, the overwhelming of us gone. 10% is Alice who traded son and pick-up for perennials. 50% are households who became one. 30%’s the Jacksons who paint the benches green downtown. Specters flee the steam pipes. Trees are white, stone even, enough to burn for 200 years. Only started warning when we near lost a boy to the ground, took our zip code. We know what’s down there, something. What it is about Centralia is what it is about the heart that only happens there.
Entries from January 2008
The Dancing Girl
January 25, 2008 · Leave a Comment
Nothing is so enormous as mother. Mother, who stares and waits for me to dance; well, I won’t dance. I stick to my room. There is no place to go though I wanted a job in the conveyor belt hamburger restaurant. Here is too clean. My sister is friends with smokers who stand by the river eating lo-mein and drinking beer from Freddy Whiteread’s with the messed up jaw. I stay at home. I dance in the corner with little pink kicks. And when the door creaks, I throw myself against the wall til mother peels me with the grease in her voice saying, go outside, it’s nice. Outside the day is always nice. It’s inside that I am a fish from the bleached barrier reef. I flap across the floor. The eyes for my mother are shy eyes, are little cool eyes. She will not see me happy.
Categories: Kim Hagerich
