by Carrie Hansen

Carrie Hansen, *Moreno Valley Donkey,* watercolor, 2017. Courtesy of the artist.

Wildlife

Carrie Hansen | Jan 2025 | Issue 41

Los Angeles

I’m enraptured with the juxtaposition of the wildlife corridor to the freeway: held back by a chain link fence and sometimes a concrete wall, bobcats and coyotes make their way along the secret length of the city. A raccoon considers a breach in the wire.

Just above them, a tour bus slows to a crawl, a pickup lurches on the shoulder. On the street, below the clacking of ravens, I try not to be surprised by skunks or stop sign-blowing Toyotas, my mouth kissed hard so recently that my thoughts wander through the fence to the wildlife corridor.

I run my hands through the neighbor’s sage. I eat a fig from a tree. I endeavor to stay outside the barrier.

Standing at my favorite ugly vista, cars going going, a stretch of road I drive every day to work, a road I drove like my heart was on fire to my old lover’s house.

Does anyone driving notice the woman stretching, back-arching, visible from the freeway? These are the things my eyes are always scanning for: a daytime crescent moon, a couple in a hotel window, a mockingbird nest in a bougainvillea.

Mendocino

I’m walking north this morning to the town beach. The driftwood shelters on the sand are like bleached dinosaur skeletons and there are weird mandalas left by teenage occultists. Bush rabbits dart beneath a massive sculpture that’s being taken over by yellow flowers.

The ocean floor here drops away so quickly that I feel the arches of my feet get light like I might hurl myself off the edge with no resistance, the rocks already in my pocket. The water’s surface is like sea glass, crystalline gray-green, dark and swelling.

I crawl inside a structure and protected from the wind, I feel no reason to leave. It’s like a chapel and feels as holy. I have an urge to light a fire, to get on my hands and knees, to have hands on my hips, to have my face pushed in the sand.

To orchestrate the breaking of my own heart, to light all the burn piles in the meadow and watch them blaze under the moonlight.

There is transcendence even in a cow pasture in the foothills above Fresno, shuddering with cold as the animals gathered with dark curious eyes to watch.

A creature nibbling in the meadow hears me and becomes more silent than silent. He is part of the meadow. He is there and not there. I want to be as much a part of this land. To plunge my fingers into the earth and to be the hole in the earth. To be one more creature, wet and green and furred and trying to survive.

Bent over, embracing a tree in the Muir Woods, I said you can come on me but not in me. In the fork of an old oak in the orchard of the college, my skirt hiked up, glory, ascension, held and rocked by the branches.

Carrie Hansen is an artist, writer, student, musician, fashion biz escapee, and college administrator; a Central Californian by birth and Los Angeleno by choice since 1999. She sings backup and presses buttons for the band Kittycraft. She lives in Northeast Los Angeles with her wife and kids.