BY KIY
interstice- a small or narrow space between things or parts
a gap; a slit; the fissure a cottonwood branch makes at dawn; the stretch of time between thoughts while idling at the window. My mornings are an interstice of leisure from the two obligations that afford me my body, as are the evenings after work. But these intervals are often brief within themselves, being prone to interruption. Earlier it was my neighbor pinholed in the door, an interstice, and now it’s the blue jays going off like car alarms. The moment between their shrill calls becomes one too.
I have a friend who loves the sound of fingers scraping across guitar strings. Whenever one is in the room, she doesn’t play it, she just runs her hands over the frets to make the noise. I told her that some guitarists coat their strings with olive oil to reduce friction. She said, I like that it has to happen to get to the next part.
An interstice does not imply a vacated form, and if something can fill the space, then the word’s definition must expand to hold it, becoming, too, a site, a transition, an opening or an aperture.
How wind flushes an alley. How a wound leaks. How late light’s skein unravels through the window, dividing the kitchen.
On a walk at night, the thin, pale band of light pollution above the city, separating darks.
The road for the houses and the houses fenced off from each other.
The vacant lot covered in goosefoot.
The suspension of mist between streetlights. I saw it haunting the corner of West End and 23rd Ave. The patch was so thin it was granular, each droplet shimmering in and out of existence on its groundward plummet. I used to name this image grief: unmeaning hung between two light sources: the before and the after. But in my aftering, I’ve felt that mist recede and swell until it wet through interpretation. Grief is not an interstice; grief spans, confuses its borders.
An interstice is made clearer by its negation straddling it: my outstretched thumb estimating distance, the moon’s curvet, a word between silences.