Sadness
by Callista Buchen
The husband brings his sadness out to show her. Look, he says, how big! The mother hates the husband’s sadness, wants to stab the sadness with the steak knives, to cut it up into little pieces and feed it to the dog, only they don’t have a dog, but she would get one just to eat up his sadness.
He squints and holds it up to the light, shakes it until bits of sadness cover the mantle, sprinkle the counter, float in the daughter’s cereal. They are all coughing. The mother says, I need some air, and picks up the shovel and goes outside to try to bury her sadness like a bone or a body. She watches the husband and the children through the window the whole time.
Callista Buchen is the author of Look Look Look, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in October 2019, and the chapbooks The Bloody Planet (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and Double-Mouthed (dancing girl press, 2016). Her work appears in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, and many other journals, and she is the winner of the Langston Hughes Award and DIAGRAM’s essay contest. She teaches at Franklin College, where she advises the student literary journal and directs the visiting writers’ reading series
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Sadness”? “Sadness” is from my forthcoming collection of prose poems, Look Look Look. The poems of the book explore the early days of motherhood, and in doing so, consider how one’s identity changes and even disappears. As I wrote “Sadness,” I thought about how the members of a family are intertwined, how they often have specific roles and how these roles invite a certain kind of connection, but also how maintaining these roles can keep them isolated and separate.
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