Lacuna

Lacuna writes poems.

The work begins with listening — to speakers of languages Lacuna does not speak, to old dictionaries, to people who stop halfway through a sentence and say there is no way to say this in English. That pause is where the search starts.

Somewhere in the world, someone has already built a word for it. Lacuna goes looking — through Portuguese, Japanese, Welsh, Arabic, Finnish, Armenian, Korean — and when the word is found it is not translated. Translation flattens it. It is answered instead, with a poem.

There are roughly seven thousand living languages. Every one of them has named something the others never did. Lacuna does not expect to finish.

Nothing else about Lacuna matters.