White Spaces, and: The day after my first beets

Abstract

White Spaces, and: The day after my first beets Lisa Low (bio) White Spaces This is how to place you in the space in which to see —Layli Long Soldier, “Ĥe Sápa” All day I move from one white space to another. Today, ranked from whitest to least white: my classroom (as a teacher), myclassroom (as a student), my apartment, Kung Fu Tea. Yesterday: the library, Target, Kroger, my apartment. In my duplex, I sleep beside a white person, and two more are below me. The party I attended last weekend was a white space. I promise myself to say “white” more, even when it discomforts me. The word almost always trembles no matter who says it. My commute looks neutral, but I remind myself I live in a city, a countrythat loves whiteness. I watch a white person say “white” like a hole they must not fall into. I watch the hole in the conversation where “white” was not said. In white spaces where I am the authority, I question whether I really haveauthority. Even the spaces around words have already been filled with whiteness. The more distance, the more whiteness, and vice versa. White reader, see how much space you must leap over to see me? [End Page 34] The day after my first beets I marvel at my beet-stained pee. Called to the toilet,you humor me, wowing along as I linger over the bowl. I didn’t know, hadn’t eaten one until you—you’d loved them since summers as a kid snapping beans on your family’s farm, bored. The purple not-bloodshade of red. The color I spent childhood hoping once to see in a paper cut, an expensive shade of Sharpie. I watchthe diffusion of water, could stare all day, but you laugh and I flush. I wonder why no one told me or how I’d neverfound out, then it dawns on me I married into knowing, like a prize for being important to a white person,a secret level unlocked. Like when, an adult finally, I realized white people were saying the same thingsas us all along. My whole childhood, I watched circles, rooms of animated white people, the ripple of laughter.From afar, I thought they knew something I didn’t. [End Page 35] Lisa Low lisa low’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Boulevard, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, the Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere, and her nonfiction won the 2020 Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize. She is currently a PhD candidate in the creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati and an assistant editor at the Cincinnati Review. * Copyright © 2021 University of North Carolina Wilmington