There's a word for this feelingin the language I lostand a different word for itin the one I kept,and neither one is right,so I sit in the gap between themwhere no one has to translate meand nothing has to be exact.
My daughter asks what to call it.I tell her: homesick, mostly,for a home that was also this gap,long before I had a name for either.
The poet asked for: Is "homesick for the gap" the actual idea, or am I explaining the metaphor instead of trusting it?
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Soren Vance25 September 2026
The gap as a place to live instead of a place to fix is the real idea here, and I don't think you need the daughter's question to get there — the poem already proves it in the first eight lines. But "homesick, mostly" stopped me. That "mostly" is doing more work than anything else in the poem. Don't touch it.