By CLARA CHIU
The smoking mouth of a barrel can barely begin the task of description which requires much more
than a mouth to speak.
How it can only utter such things as: open.
A front door swings open
and you enter the page. That is, I have been spoken into existence. Let us proceed here, from this written foyer – this place that empties to the destination called home.
As with any familiar landscape, we see and recall in objects.
A wreath hung over the kitchen sink, infusing the air with pine, turning the world December-lit.
The lopsided coffee pot, leveled with a cutting board. The table where you cupped your hands under my chin and lowered my head into a nod. When my eyes met the floor, I unlearned the habit of memory. Show me how to begin again, I said, after the fact.
The worn trail of your back and forth, lacing floorboards with footsteps, with a premonition that rattles the interior. Shiver and call it awe, please and thank you. At the hearth, the chairs arranged to watch evenings arrive; a domestic tableau we enter with practiced distraction. Here is the firewood, halved into silence.
Here is the chimney I climbed up to find Santa Claus. My hands met ash and scorn and an exit route. From the roof, the ground looked diminutive
the way it does when your eyes
remember gravity. Seated on the rough shingle, I nibbled on letters of the alphabet.
I was so occupied with Y that I missed the sound of your starting gun.
Under my tongue, it tasted something like laughter.
Writer | Clara Chiu ’26 | cchiu27@amherst.edu
Editor | Jude Tait ’28 | vtait28@amherst.edu