I left my keys
in the lock
all night
then spent the morning
looking for them.
Are you dissociating
like me
or have we all
started leaving
before we go?
Tag: Memory
-
Locked
-
Before It Had to Be Named
I have never told a man
I loved him first.Not because I didn’t.
Because I believed
love should recognize itself
before it had to be named.I thought if it was true
it would arrive on your lips
before it ever reached mine.Then you happened.
For the first time
I wanted to say it.I carried those words
like water in my mouth
afraid that if I spoke
I would lose
both the water
and the thirst.So I said nothing.
Instead, I loved you like the wind
the wind that finds your face
before you have opened your eyesthat moves through your hair
and catches in your breathleaving you to wonder
what your heart remembered
that your mind could not name.It hurts to love you
because the feeling is real
and has nowhere to go.No place in your life
where it can remain.So I carry it into mornings
into songs I cannot finish
into every quiet place
that still makes room for you.I have questioned everything else
my judgment
my timing
the meaning of your silence.But never this.
Never the love.
I only wanted one impossible thing:
for you to know
that somewhere in this worldyou were loved
by a woman who had never told a man
she loved him firstand still could not bring herself
to tell you.So if, on some ordinary morning
the wind finds your facelingers for just a moment
and catches in your breathlet it be enough.
Let it carry the words
I could not. -
—
I have tried
to keep poetry
as a pet.I gave it a place to sleep.
I fed it
the parts of myself
I could not say
without becoming unbearable.It ate everything.
My mother’s aging.
My father’s absence.
The men I loved
beyond the point of dignity.It ate the woman
I used to beand came back hungry.
Mine has ruined furniture.
It has found every place
I healed badlyand slept inside it.
It has dragged
every version of me
I buriedback through the house
leaving them
at least my feetas if I should
thank it.Sometimes
it disappears.I search for it
inside the silenceunder the bed
behind every sentence
I try to force
into meaning.Nothing.
I begin to wonder
whether I have emptied myself
so completelythere is nothing left
worth feeding anymore.Then I feel it move.
Not gently.
It has never bitten me.
It simply waits
until I call something healedthen nudges it
with one quiet word.
Sometimes I think
poetry isn’t eating me.It’s removing
everything
that isn’t mine.
I open the door.
It walks past me,
carrying something of mine
still trying
to become
a sentence.I spent years believing
I was keeping poetry alive.It never wanted food.
It wanted
the woman
who walked into the poembecause it knew
she would not be
the one
who walked out.
-
Before Her Voice Was Air
Do you remember being a fetus?
Neither do I.
But once
I lived inside my mother.I knew her first
without seeing her.
The sound of blood moving.
Her heart somewhere above me.The strange underwater version
of her voice.I wonder what laughter sounded like
from in there.Whether it shook the water.
Whether sadness did too.
Whether I knew the difference.
When she walked,
the whole world moved.When she slept,
I disappeared into her sleep.I went everywhere she went
without knowing
there was anywhere else to go.I had never seen light.
Never felt air
against my skin.Never been alone.
I knew her
before I knew what a mother was.Before I knew
there could be distance
between one body
and another.There must have been
a last night inside her.This is the part
I keep thinking about.A last night
when I still lived
entirely inside another person,and neither of us
called it goodbye.
Then morning came.
And for the first time,
her voice
was no longer underwater. -
With a Match
I once believed in a bay leaf.
I wrote what I wanted
on its dry green body.A name.
A wish.
Sometimes only a word.Then I burned it.
I watched the edges curl inward
the leaf blacken
the handwriting vanish
before the wish did.
I have believed in candles.
In numbers appearing twice.
In dreams arriving before dawn.
In songs playing at exactly the wrong moment
and therefore meaning something.I have asked the dead for signs.
I have left coffee
where no living person would drink it.But the bay leaf—
I believed in that one.
Maybe because it came from the kitchen.
Because it was ordinary.
Because it had spent its whole life
being dropped into pots
to make something taste deeper
without ever being eaten.There are things I wrote on those leaves
that never came true.People who did not stay.
Doors that remained closed.
Bodies that did not heal.
Love that arrived
and still could not belong to me.I used to wonder
if I had done something wrong.Used the wrong ink.
Burned it incorrectly.
Asked for too much.
Still—
every once in a while
I open the cabinet
and see the little glass jar.Dry leaves
pressed against one another.Quiet.
Waiting.
And for one second
I become the woman I was—the one who believed
the distance between wanting something
and having itcould be crossed
with a match.
-
Stanza Is the Bone
A stanza is the bone.
Nothing—
not even a life—
can be carried
all at once.Everything else
is me
trying not to come apart
in public.My hand around my ankle
like I am keeping
some part of me
from leaving.
My body
wrapped in denim.My whole life
pretending
this is just a way
to sit.I feel
so temporary.The bracelet.
The shoe.
The watercolor flowers
beneath my skin.I needed evidence
that I was here.
That I could drown
inside myselfand still come up
breathing. -
Unbelievable
There is a room in me
where everything I have ever loved
eventually becomes unbelievable.I’ve been here before.
I know this room.
My mind cannot reconcile
two realities.That you were here.
And that now
it feels
like I made
the whole thing up.
-
Hallways
For as long as I can remember, my dreams have had architecture.
Not mountains. Not oceans.
Hallways.
Hospital corridors. Hotels. Schools I have never attended. Houses that belong to no one I know. Fluorescent lights. Closed doors. Numbers I cannot quite read.
There is always another room. I am always trying to find it.
Sometimes I know what is behind the door. Most of the time, I do not.
Lately, I have begun to wonder whether I have spent my entire life this way—not in rooms, but between them.
A hallway is not meant to be lived in. It exists only because there is somewhere else to go. No one chooses one as a destination. No one says, this is where I will stay.
And yet, so much of my life has happened there: in waiting, in becoming, in the long, unfinished passage between one version of myself and the next.
A few months after my father died of lung cancer in 2014, I had a dream.
I was inside a hospital. People were moving quickly through the corridors, rushing in and out of rooms, carrying papers, calling to one another. There were doors everywhere.
Someone stopped me and said they had pulled my father out for me. He was in a room down the hall.
Room 214, maybe.
A woman in scrubs caught my arm before I reached it.
They had found a cure, she told me.
Not for every cancer.
For his.
They had brought him back.
Even in the dream, I knew this was impossible. My father had been cremated. I remember thinking it clearly.
He was cremated.
But I followed her anyway.
Hope has never required evidence.
He was lying in a hospital bed, thin and fragile, the oxygen cannula still beneath his nose. He looked exactly as I remembered him near the end.
But he was breathing.
That was all I could see.
He was breathing.
I went to him as if I had been handed a miracle and was afraid it might be taken back if I asked too many questions.
I told him they had found a medicine. I told him it was saving people. I told him he did not have to die anymore.
He looked at me.
Then he reached for my hand.
He had very little strength, but his fingers closed around my wrist with surprising force.
“Let me rest,” he said.
Then he turned onto his side.
Underneath him were the ashes.
All of them.
Ashes beneath the body that was still breathing.
I woke terrified.
For years, I remembered the dream as a message about death. Now I am not sure it was.
Maybe the hallway had been there all along.
There have been many of them since: the corridor outside my father’s room, the hallway outside my sons’ bedrooms when they were still young enough to need me, the airport passage where one of them walked away in uniform and did not look like a child anymore, the narrow stretch of my own house after everyone has gone home, a restaurant after closing—chairs turned over, lights lowered, the day emptied out of it.
Even now, I am often standing somewhere between what was and what comes next.
Not grieving as I once did.
Not free of it either.
Not the woman I was.
Not yet the woman I am becoming.
A hallway.
The cruel thing about hallways is that you can still see the door behind you. Sometimes you can still hear voices through it.
But you cannot live there anymore.
I have spent years trying to return to rooms that no longer exist: the room where my father was alive, the room where my sons were children, the room where I believed love, if it was deep enough, would eventually become honest, the room where I knew who I was.
But memory is not a key.
It opens nothing.
It only lets you stand close enough to remember the shape of the handle.
Maybe that is why my dreams keep building hallways.
Rooms suggest arrival. They suggest certainty. They suggest that something has finally been decided.
Hallways do not lie that way.
They admit that we are between things. They admit that the person who enters is not always the person who comes out. They admit that sometimes there is no revelation on the other side.
Sometimes there is only another corridor.
Another number.
Another door.
I used to think transition meant I was lost. Now I think it may be the most honest place a person can stand—not where she was, not where she is going, but in the long passage between them.
And perhaps that is why my dreams never give me a destination.
I have spent so much of my life becoming someone else that my subconscious no longer bothers building rooms.
It builds another hallway.
-
My Mother
My mother and I share the same blood.
B Rh-negative.
The same rare inheritance.
The same river moving through us.
The same red history traveling from one body into another.
She carried me beneath her heart for nine months.
An entire season of becoming.
Blood teaching blood how to assemble itself.
Bone finding bone.
A spine.
A mouth.
Ten fingers opening toward a life neither of us had seen.
She made my body.
This is no small thing.
The original shelter.
The dark and sacred room where I began.
But the older I become the more I understand that being born from someone does not guarantee being understood by them.
The womb creates a body.
It does not necessarily create recognition.
My mother and I share the same blood.
B Rh-negative.
The same rare inheritance.
And still, we spent years trying to find a language large enough to hold us both.
My mother spoke.
God, how she spoke.
Stories.
Worries.
Grievances.
Disappointments.
The thousand daily abrasions of being alive.
She sat me down and handed me pieces of adulthood long before I was large enough to carry them.
And because I loved her
I did.
I listened.
I absorbed.
I learned the weather patterns of another person’s sorrow before I had learned my own.
I became her witness.
Her companion.
Her sounding board.
The child at the other end of conversations meant for grown women.
Perhaps that is why language became my native country.
Why I reach for words the way other people reach for prayer.
Why I cannot leave a question unanswered.
A feeling unnamed.
A loose thread hanging from the hem of a perfectly good life.
I learned early that everything must be examined.
Everything discussed.
Everything understood.
And I am tired.
Not of my mother.
Never of my mother.
I love her.
Love has never been the problem.
The problem is that love and understanding are often mistaken for twins when they are merely neighbors.
So we spent years waving to one another across a distance neither of us knew how to cross.
Then there was my father.
A man who seemed perpetually occupied by some private cosmic adventure.
A man of so few words that silence gathered around him like a second skin.
Yet I could sit beside him for an entire afternoon and feel more understood than I did in conversations that lasted years.
He never asked me to carry his grief.
Never handed me the weight of his interior life.
He simply made room for mine.
And when he died everyone assumed I was grieving a father.
What I was grieving was recognition.
The rare miracle of being witnessed without explanation.
Without performance.
Without the exhausting labor of translating myself into a language someone else might finally understand.
Perhaps that is why unfinished things haunt me.
Why I pull every thread.
Why I interrogate every silence.
Why I stand before mysteries demanding they surrender their meaning.
I spent my childhood holding one end of conversations that never seemed to end.
Of course I grew into a woman who wants answers.
Of course I became someone who believes every story deserves a conclusion.
But lately
I am beginning to suspect
that not everything unfinished
is broken.
That not every silence is withholding something.
That some people love us through language.
And others through presence.
That understanding sometimes arrives speaking.
And sometimes arrives and simply sits beside you.
The same blood does not guarantee recognition.
The same house does not guarantee understanding.
And yet—
love persists.
My mother and I
still waving across the distance.
My father gone and somehow still answering me.
The child I was
standing between them
learning two different dialects of devotion.
One made of words.
One made of silence.
And all these years later
I am still trying to become fluent in both.
-
Women of Salt
It never took much to fill my stomach.
I thought that was simply the way I was.
A small appetite.
A child satisfied easily.
Years later I understood that hunger had already been negotiated long before the plate reached me.
The women in my family were experts at subtraction.
A little less for themselves.
A little more for everyone else.
No announcements.
No speeches.
No visible sacrifice.
Just small adjustments made so often they became invisible.
A spoonful here.
A portion there.
A second helping quietly redirected.
The mathematics of survival.
I never noticed it as a child.
Children rarely do.
I thought food simply appeared.
I thought dinner was dinner.
I thought everyone lived this way.
I did not understand that somewhere between the kitchen and the table, someone had already decided I would eat first.
This was Cuba.
Not the Cuba in photographs.
Not the Cuba tourists carried home in their suitcases.
A society of shortages.
Food shortages.
Soap shortages.
Fuel shortages.
Power outages that arrived without warning.
The endless improvisation required to survive them.
And yet the women continued.
They always continued.
I remember entire aisles filled with Russian canned meat.
The same can.
Again and again.
Shelf after shelf.
As though variety itself had become a luxury.
As though eating anything else had ever been an option.
At the time none of it felt strange.
Children accept the reality they are given.
The astonishing becomes ordinary very quickly.
I remember ash being gathered and sifted through cloth until only the finest powder remained.
No splinters.
No debris.
Only a soft gray dust.
Then the dishes were washed with it.
Astonishing, but true.
The meal fed the family.
The fire cooked the meal.
The ashes cleaned the plates.
Nothing was wasted.
Not food.
Not labor.
Not a single useful thing.
I remember the ash beneath their fingernails.
The smell of smoke that never seemed to leave their clothes.
The certainty with which they moved through scarcity.
As though survival were not remarkable.
As though it were simply what morning required.
Looking back, I realize they treated themselves the same way.
Reducing here.
Stretching there.
Giving and giving until very little remained.
And somehow still finding enough to offer.
Perhaps that is why it never took much to fill my stomach.
I was eating from portions made larger by the hunger of women who loved me.
I miss these women.
More than I know how to explain.
Not because they were perfect.
Not because they never failed.
Because they understood things I am only now beginning to understand.
The quiet negotiations of love.
The invisible mathematics of survival.
The dignity of continuing.
I see every version of myself in them.
The woman who worries.
The woman who nurtures.
The woman who remembers.
The woman who gives more than she should.
The woman who keeps going.
Sometimes I think inheritance has very little to do with what we are given.
Perhaps inheritance is recognition.
The sudden realization that the people we miss never truly leave.
They remain in our gestures.
In our habits.
In the way we love.
In the way we endure.
Today I feel as though I lived a life only fiction could properly explain.
Not because it was tragic.
Not because it was beautiful.
Because it was both at once.
The kind of life where dishes were washed with ashes.
Where store shelves repeated the same can until repetition itself became abundance.
Where women performed miracles and called it chores.
The women in my family were made of salt.
‘Women of Salt’ The proof was everywhere.
In the sweat.
In the sea surrounding the island.
In the meals that appeared when there should have been none.
In the hands that gave more than they kept.
In the quiet arithmetic that took place before every meal.
And when I look closely enough, I find them everywhere.
Including myself.
-
Redolence
When I see birds
I can almost smell themAn odd thing to confess aloud
They smell like a wound drizzled by morning rain
like dust lifting softly from pavement after weather
like roses still carrying the cold breath of dawnNot unpleasant
Just painfully alive
Ancient somehow
As though feathers preserve memories
the body spends years trying to outliveStrange how scent reaches the soul before thought does
One breath
and suddenly the past becomes physical againThe ache gathering beneath the ribs
the overwhelming feeling
of having lost something beautiful long agoThat invisible meeting place between longing and recognition
The way certain scents return us
not only to people
but to former versions of ourselvesSofter selves
unguarded ones
the selves that still believed tenderness
could exist without disappearance attached to it
And perhaps that is why birds unsettle me
Because when they cross the evening sky
carrying the fragrance of rain and distance and earth
something inside me rises toward them instinctivelyNot joy exactly
not sorrow eitherBut the unbearable remembrance
of who I was
before longing became part of my nature -
Freedom’s Address
My childhood home stood two blocks from the sea
Not metaphorically
Truly
Two blocks of crumbling pavement
past the embassies with their iron gates
and foreign flags lifting beautifully
in the Caribbean wind
like freedom had an address
and we did notI remember the terrible contrast of it
chauffeurs polishing black cars
while old women downstairs
watered thin soup to feed five mouthsDiplomats drinking imported whiskey
behind guarded glass
while boys in torn sandals
kicked flat soccer balls through alleyways
smelling of salt
kerosene
and exhaustionAnd yet the ocean belonged to everyone
That was the unbearable beauty of Cuba
The poor could stand at the Malecón at dusk
beside men who had never missed a meal
and both would fall silent
before the same enormous waterBecause the sea did not care
who was oppressed
and who carried a passport outIt touched every stone equally
At night
the waves struck the seawall so hard
the spray reached the streets
cool against our faces
like the island itself
refusing to die quietlyI grew up understanding freedom
not as politicsbut as distance
As horizon
As the ache of watching ships
become smaller and smaller
until they dissolved completely
into another lifeSome nights
the grownups lowered their voices
when certain subjects entered the roomBut the ocean
the ocean never whisperedIt roared openly beside us
Restless
UncontainedI think that is why Cubans carry sadness
so elegantlyWe were raised beside something infinite
while living inside limitationRaised hearing waves
crash against stone
over
and over
and over againas if the earth itself
believed no wall
should remain standing foreverEven now
far from that coastline
I still need water near meNot for leisure
Not for beautyFor memory
Because somewhere inside me
there is still a little girl
walking toward the sea at twilight
past embassies glowing gold
past tired buildings collapsing inward
past the unbearable divide
between the free and the trappedbelieving
with her entire heart
that the horizon meant
there had to be more than this
-
Preface of a Harbor
A woman facing water
Preface of a Harbor | Charcoal Has existed in art longer than memory itself
waiting
grieving
remembering
becomingThe harbor is not merely a place in these sketches
It is the human condition
the shoreline between staying and leaving
Smudging of a Harbor | Graphite I drew the figure again and again in charcoal
because charcoal behaves like memory
it smudges
disappears
darkens where touched too oftenAnd the lighthouse became abstract on purpose
Some people are not meant to be rendered clearly
Some loves survive only in silhouette
“Harbor | Charcoal So I kept stripping the image down
less harbor
less certainty
more white space
more silence
until all that remained
was a woman
an ocean
and the unbearable softness
of standing still
while something inside her
kept drifting toward shore -
Ambergris
Too late to ruin a life completely.
And maybe that is why the body refuses to forget it.
Not the person exactly.
The atmosphere of them. The warmth left behind in certain rooms. The way silence changed when they entered it. The unbearable intimacy of standing too close while pretending not to notice.
And even now, years or hours or lifetimes later something remains.
Like the ghost of ambergris
still clinging faintly to a collar or the wrist of someone passing too near—warm and mineral and devastatingly human.The kind of scent that makes the body remember before the mind has time to defend itself.
Too late to ruin a life completely.
Yet somehow still capable of altering the pulse.
Because some connections never become ordinary enough to lose their sensuality.
They remain suspended
living softly beneath the skin—where longing becomes indistinguishable from memory.And perhaps that is why these loves endure.
Not because they lasted.
Because they never fully touched the ground.
Like desire itself
trying very hard
to remain civilized. -
Prelude to Rumor
this, comes from something I’ve felt for a long time but didn’t know how to show
the first time it happened I was twelve
standing in front of a mirror, looking at myself too long—something shifted
I could see my face, but I couldn’t feel that it was me, and that frightened me
since then, I’ve learned to recognize the feeling
it comes quietly
I keep talking, moving doing what I’m doing but I’m not fully inside it
this is what that feels like to me
like something begins at one point
here at the shoulder and then spreads outward
not as damage
not as pain
but as a kind of release
like I am still here but also moving beyond the shape that holds me
the lines are that movement
the color is everything that doesn’t stay contained
the body is what remains when something in me has already stepped away
I call it rumor in skin because it doesn’t arrive as something clear or visible
it begins as a feeling barely there
difficult to name
something moving under the surface before it can be seen
it spreads quietly
without asking
and by the time I recognize it
it is already happening
Rumor in Skin -
Mid Flight
I start with a line
graphite—light
almost unsure of itselfbecause if I press too hard it becomes a commitment
and I’ve spent years
living inside commitments
that didn’t fully belong to meI build it slowly
short strokes
adjustments
erasures
small negotiations with the pageI try to find the shape
something recognizable
something that makes sensethis is the part
I was taught to trustthe part that can be explained
justified
approvedI hear his voice here
clear
decisiveyou can’t make a living with words
you can’t make a life out of artso I learned
to keep it contained
to make it small enough
to exist without threatening anythingbut it never stays
somewhere in the middle
my hand loosens
not because I decide to
because I can’t hold it anymore
and that’s when I reach
for waterI let it fall
not controlled
not measured
I let it touch the graphite
and pull it outwardand it spreads
past the edges
past the version
that was acceptablepast the place
where I could still saythis is just a drawing
and I watch it
because I know
this part is not about skill
this is release
this is the place
I was told
not to trustwords do the same thing
they start contained
careful
edited
safeand then
they don’t
they spill
they move
they say things
I didn’t plan to admitand I come here
again
and again
and againnot because I’m searching
because I cannot swallow it
I tried
for years
to keep it inside
to make a life
that didn’t need thisbut something in me
refusedquietly
consistently
until it began to show up in my body
in that pressure
in that drop
in those moments
where everything looks fineand still
something is missing
this
this is where it goes
this page
this space
this place where I don’t have to explain
or prove
or justifythis is where I am allowed
to exist
without translating myself
the bird appears here
or almost does
mid-flight
mid-fall
mid-becomingI don’t try to fix it anymore
I let it stay unclear
because that’s the only way it feels honest
I used to think
if it couldn’t be something
I could live fromit wasn’t worth this
this time
this attention
this needbut now
I see it differently
this isn’t about making a living
this is about not disappearing
this is about giving shape to something in me that will not stay silent
and every time
I let it outin lines
in water
in wordssomething in me
settlesnot completely
never completely
but enough
to breathe
and maybe that’s what this is
not a career
not a plana place
where I don’t have to hold it all
where I can let it move
where I can let it be seen
where I can stop pretending
it isn’t there
and that
that is why
I keep coming back
-
Afterlight
I watched the sun hide
and the birds went after it
Habit of following not all at once, not in some perfect formation
you could name or studyjust one lifting then another then more until the sky itself looked like it had decided not to stay still
like something moved through them and they answered
no thinking
no pausing
no weighing what it meantjust wing
and directionand me —I stayed
because that’s what we do
we stand there
and understand itwe know the sun is leaving
we know it comes back
we know this is the oldest pattern
there islight goes
light returnswe’ve made peace with it or at least we pretend to
we tell ourselves
this is how things continueand still—they go
small bodies
holding the last heat of it
as if they can feel
the exact moment
it slips out of reachand they refuse
to let it go quietlythey follow past where it makes sense past where there is anything left to follow
and I watch them
thinking how strange it isthey don’t know
what we know
they don’t know about tomorrow
or return
or the comfort
of things coming backto them
light is not a promiseit’s an occurrence
it was there
it touched them
it warmed them
and now it isn’t
and that is enough
to moveso they move
and we don’t
we stay
we explain
we name it
so it hurts lesswe say
it’s fine
it’s supposed to happenwe say
it will come backwe say
waitand we do
we learn how to stand still
inside loss
and call it understandingand then
when everything is gone
when the sky empties itself of even the idea of lightthere’s always one
Habit of following a songbird somewhere
you can’t seestill singing
not louder than the dark
not enough to change anythingjust steady
like it missed the ending
or chose not to believe in itand that’s when it turns
because we say we’re different
we say we understandbut we do it too
just not with wings
we call things back
in quieter waysin memory
in longing
in the way we return
to what is already gone
and sit there with it
as if it might shiftwe replay voices
we hold onto warmth
long after it has left the roomwe don’t rise into the sky
but we follow
in thought
in feeling
in the quiet insistence
that something that mattered should not end so cleanlyand I stand there
between themtheir instinct
and my knowingknowing the sun will return without being called
knowing there is no need
and still
feeling it
that pull
deep and unreasonableto call it back
as if, just once
it might listen
Habit of Following
-
Petal Riser
You take me the way the sun finds a flower that never learned its morning
Not with warmth, but with a patience that does not leave
I had grown used to the dark
The kind that settles into the root
Until even the idea of opening feels like a mistake
The garden did not question me
It let me remain folded into myself
Petal against petal, a small life no one could enter
And no one could ruin
It worked
Nothing reached me
Nothing stayed
I waited for the taking
I knew how it went—how anything that sees you open does not stop
So I held myself tighter
Closed even against the light
As if survival meant never being seen soft again
And still
Something in me began to give
Not bloom, never bloom
Just a slight failure in my keeping
A single petal loosening as if it had grown tired of protecting what no one had come for
I felt it like grief
Sharp, quiet, uninvited
The body remembering something it had buried to keep living
You saw it
And you did nothing
You did not reach
You did not take
You did not ask for more
You stayed as if that one small opening was already too much to ask of me
And that
That is what broke me
Because I had been taught that anything that stays will hurt you eventually
That love is only a slower kind of loss
But you
You stayed exactly where I left you
As if I did not have to give you anything else
And so
I opened a little more
Not for you
Not even for the light
But because, for the first time
I felt something I did not recognize
The absence of harm
And it was unbearable
Because it meant
I had been closed all this time for something that was not here
And now
I do not know how far I can open
I do not know if the dark will return
But something in me
Something small, tired, still alive
Keeps loosening despite it
Because you did not take me when you could have
Because you did not break me when I was already open enough to be broken
Because you stayed long enough for me to feel what it is to be held in the light
And not disappear
-
Personal
My first ink experience was 26 years ago.
Will never forget my parent’s faces, over a tiny butterfly on ankle.
Dad would say ‘do you want to be a walking newspaper’
After 18 months of metastatic cancer and home hospice he parted to a dimension of familiarity, lush greenery filling his lungs with oxygen.
I grieved, and edited every square inch of my arm, as my mental health spiraled.
At times I regret the crowdedness of colors.
A tabloid – I suppose.
-
109
Orbits of grace
At the in’s of me
Right here
I fall
110
Times a day
Like something
That still glows
Tucked, under
A single address
My land of traumas
Heightened with fear
A place that holds
My childhood
So terrifyingly
Deciphering torment
And the inability
To seek help
From people
Who watch you
Fall, in less dirt
Painful terrains
This is Cuba – 1979
Martyrs of disguise
Making parenthood
Less fiable
As everyone
Is too busy
Surviving
Their
Own
Imprisonment
I’ve been
A lonely walker
For decades
This life
Has taught me
To believe
That above my name
There is a vacancy
A beautiful sky
With blue lips
That speak for me
Making peace
For the rest
Of my existence
Like a road
That is long
Yet spangled
-
Shades of Purgatory
I once knew
How light was spent
Its trickling effects
As faith pointed
With a golden rod
My own despair
Sat in a womb of fear
Aware it was not science
My conscious inadvertently
Reversed millions of words
Narrowing it down to one
-God
-
Quiet Resentment
Heavy lines
Mounted over me
These purple nights
Drowning super stars
Forgetting what it is to write
Phosphorus dynamite
Encircles and intertwines
Muting one decade at a time
-
Just hold . .
Stone COLD
Hold ON
You’re still STRONG
NERVE pain loneliness
I haven’t LEARNED anything
EXCEPT for the LINES across your FACE
MORE human, than YESTERDAY
-
Next Train . .
I am adapting
Cowardly, but adapting
This is distinction
Between surviving
And existence
-
‘Brightness Of My Dark’
One must be blind
Stripping God of its own light
Things none of us could be
The profound luster in lines
It’s happening to me
A wound, too echo’d to reveal
That love is not found in days
-
To be broken . .
Fight for insight
God’s copyright
In this interior of light
My signature becomes
A wrath that requires no reason
-
Almost . .
Forgot
How still
Your mind is
This is not
A compliment
It’s rhetoric,
It chokes
The good parts of me
-
Night’Comes
Covers us in blue
In the instant
Of this instant
Memory invents
Another present
A circular courtyard
With superstitious
Flashes of light
Intended to cover
Every crack in our horizon
-
Mimic
The eternities of a second
My whole life to solve
Pitiless searches for a body
To grow old with
Nameless sensations
Such a cruel thing
To miss the dead
With this immeasurable clarity
Like gravid drops of hope
Spinning over itself
Tirelessly, till we learn
How to love, again . .
-
Untimely
The furthest of reaches
Sex seal serpentines
These syllogisms
Transform me
Inside is outside
It is everywhere
And nowhere
Invented
Devoured
– Man
-
Nobody Knows
We live in identical rooms
We blankly wake, we greet
From one balcony to another
Successively for a hundred years
Between now and tomorrow
We will spend the rest of our days
Growing gardens out of angry stars
-
To me . .
the world spins
ready to loose, and peel
comparable to a star
proudly moving through water
there is no equal
more beautiful
than her roseness at my feet
i admit here, i seek shelter
a shelter of brightness
when most of my most, is dark
cross high and unstrange
Mari Sánchez Cayuso 
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