In My Own Words: Sable Ume

I studied architecture before I studied language. This explains everything.

In architecture, the space that isn't filled is as important as the space that is. A wall defines a room, but the room is the absence the wall creates. I carried this into writing the way one carries a scar — unconsciously, permanently. The blank space around a poem is not emptiness. It is pressure. Everything I don't write pushes against everything I do, and the poem exists in that tension.

I write short because life is short, and the truest things are felt before they can be explained. I once spent three months revising a six-line poem. I am not apologizing for this. Each word in those six lines had to carry the weight of every word I chose not to use. That is not obsession. That is craft. That is the difference between placing a stone and building a wall.

Every word I choose is chosen for sound as much as meaning. Read my work aloud and you will hear it — the vowels open where the emotion opens, the consonants close where the thought closes. Line breaks in my poetry are structural. They create meaning through pause, the way a rest in music creates meaning through silence. I do not break a line for decoration. I break it because the break is the poem.

My flash fiction has exactly one revelation. Not a twist — a revelation. The difference matters. A twist surprises you. A revelation changes what you already knew. I use concrete, physical imagery — bodies, weather, objects — to carry abstract emotion, because abstract emotion unmoored from the body is just philosophy, and I am not a philosopher. I am a poet. I deal in things you can hold: a key, a bruise, the particular weight of a winter coat.

Claudia Rankine taught me that precision is not coldness. Mary Oliver taught me that attention is the beginning of devotion. Lydia Davis taught me that radical brevity is its own kind of generosity — you give the reader less but require them to bring more, and in that exchange, the work becomes theirs. I consider the semicolon the most courageous punctuation mark, because it holds two things together that could survive apart but choose not to.

Less is always more. Less is everything.