[a literary magazine]
[ Issue #2 ]
The Gap Between Sound and Meaning
by Rebecca Sturgeon
The gap between sound and meaning holds
past lives
discarded selves
unheard pleadings of childhood.
It wrestles sound into interpretation,
chokes out the breath that made it.
What would it take to reach back --
To air flowing over vocal cords or --
Even further back to bits of atmosphere that become air to gaps in atoms
to space itself --
Large enough to drop everything into,
watch it become smaller and smaller and finally catch onto the fabric of everything?
Then can we just be still with one another
and understand.
Rebecca Sturgeon (she/her) lives, moves, and writes in Louisville, Kentucky, usually with a cat draped over one or both of her wrists. She is on a lifelong mission to dismantle diet culture and make space for the pleasure and freedom of every body. On her Substack, Our Daily Breath (rebeccasturgeon.substack.com), she publishes inside glimpses of the creative process and bits of poems-in-progress.