It doesn’t matter how it happens.  Starting as a pinhead, or a poppy seed, then a peach pit, then it’s a parking space, then it’s the kind of warehouse loft space you can actually move into, when you move in you grow into the space, you need more space, it doesn’t matter if there isn’t enough—the space is united but we divide it between us, as if we need to be separate, of course everything is possible, but is it enough?  Growing into the space we outgrow the space we’re in, when there isn’t enough there isn’t space for everybody, we have to take somebody else’s space, we need more space when we don’t have enough.  It doesn’t matter whose space it is, or was before we moved in, we’re not even angry when we’re squeezed in.  As soon as we move in we put up walls, rooms inside the walls, nothing is impossible as long as there’s space, there’s nothing else to do.  The space doesn’t notice who’s in the space, or who moves in when who moves out, it’s not even personal, the way a story doesn’t need to know what happens to it when it’s happening. You don’t have to say it happened this way or the other way.  It doesn’t matter how it happens.

 

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Peter Leight lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.  He has previously published poems in Paris Review, AGNI, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, FIELD, and other magazines.