We stand within a room that listens
Walls attenuated to membranes
The air drawn taut, almost sterile
You do not touch me
Still—something in me ignites
A filament catching beneath the sternum
Your nearness is surgical
Meticulous
It locates the fault line in my composure with unnerving precision
Then lingers there
Not cutting, not yet
Only mapping the terrain of where I might yield
Warmth transferred with clinical patience
As though sensation itself were being measured, dose by careful dose
I feel you subcutaneously
This is not love
But we hover
God, how precisely we hover
Two bodies aligned in tension, studying this narrowing distance
As though it were an aperture through which something irreversible might pass
And still, you do not touch me
Yet something has already been altered—your proximity
A marked intrusion upon my interior
A presence that settles just beneath the threshold of skin
And I carry it—as a sustained incision
Clean, deliberate, and exquisitely unclosed
Mari Sánchez Cayuso 
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