space

One thing I wish I could do is write short stories! I love their brevity and how dense they are, their striking endings. But they also have a nice loose quality which I appreciate after reading a lot of poetry. I came across this line from Lan Samantha Chang’s “San” from Hunger that I really liked. 

We spoke gently to each other about harmless, tactful things. “Peanut sauce,” we said. “Shopping.” “Homework.” “Apricots.”

The conversations are between a mom and daughter after the dad left them. It’s so quiet, but it struck me because usually I think of words as full, pointing in so many different directions at different things, a lot of little arrows. But these words seem like stand-ins for what otherwise might be empty, used to fill up space. It seems like space, instead of being completely invisible, has a physical presence that’s made known by what touches or masks it. Like a sheet that’s draped over a chair shows the outline of not only the chair but also the space around it. Then again—how often is a sheet draped over a chair? Beth Bachmann wrote in an interview about her poetry that “silences are important, a place to dwell…It’s one way of dealing with space, moving around it.” Even if sheets aren’t draped over chairs that often, I like the idea of space, or silence, having a tangible existence, which gives meaning to what a hole is.