Mari Sánchez Cayuso

Tag: reading

  • Living Tissue

    Literature, to me,
    is a living organism.

    Its pages are tissue.
    Its margins, skin.

    Every sentence
    makes an opening.

    This page has a pulse.

    It beats
    beneath your eyes.

    But it is also my house—

    the body
    my mind returns to
    when it has nowhere else
    to go.

    This is where it stops,
    where it rests,
    where it lays down
    what it has carried
    too long.

    A thought enters
    and removes its coat.

    A memory sits
    at the edge of the bed.

    What I cannot say aloud
    finds a room here.

    That is how we meet—

    through the fibers
    of the web,

    your eyes moving
    through the place
    where I have left
    pieces of myself.

    Mycelium

    Some readers arrive
    like stitches.

    Some arrive
    with clean hands
    and know instinctively
    where not to touch.

    Others come
    with no intention
    of being gentle,

    turning the wound
    toward the light
    to see
    what refuses
    to close.

    A page remembers
    every person
    who has handled it.

    It changes temperature.
    It alters its breathing.

    Sometimes
    it begins bleeding
    before the reader
    has reached the end.

    Coagulation
    is inconsistent.

    It depends
    on who found the wound—

    on whether they came
    to close it,
    to study it,
    or simply
    to watch it bleed.

    Perhaps you came
    only to read.

    Perhaps you did not know
    that reading
    is a form of touch.

    But now you are here,

    inside the house
    my mind built
    to survive itself.

    And for as long
    as you remain,

    the walls keep breathing.
    The page keeps beating.

    Somewhere between
    your eyes
    and my words,

    the distance
    becomes tissue.

  • Why Plath

    People ask me why Sylvia Plath.

    The answer has never been the same.

    I didn’t discover her all at once. I found her in pieces, in used bookstores on the East Coast when I was in my twenties and still believed a book could explain me back to myself.

    The poems.
    The novel.
    The journals.
    The letters.

    I have lived with Sylvia Plath on my shelves for decades.

    What fascinates me now is that I have never read the same Sylvia Plath twice.

    The woman who first opened those books in her twenties is gone. So is the woman who returned to them in her thirties, and again in her forties.

    The books never moved.

    I did.

    That is the strange thing about certain writers. They stay exactly where you left them, waiting for you to become another woman.

    People often assume I loved Plath because of the darkness.

    I didn’t.

    I loved her because she refused to pretend the darkness wasn’t there.

    There is a difference.

    Here was a woman who seemed to do everything right.

    She married.
    She had children.
    She wrote.
    She built the life women were expected to want.

    And still.

    There was an inner life that refused to be resolved.

    That was the part I never got over.

    The way a woman can do all the right things and still remain suspended within herself.

    Maybe that is why I understood her before I knew how to explain myself.

    I have not opened one of her books in years.

    Not because I stopped loving her.

    Because I survived many things with Sylvia Plath.

    And surviving is not the same as staying.

    I think that is what literature does if you live long enough.

    It does not change.

    You do.

    And every time you return to it, it hands you a different version of yourself.

    The greatest gift Sylvia Plath gave me was never only her words.

    It was knowing someone had reached those dark, suspended places before me and left language there.

    So when I arrived, I did not feel entirely alone.

    Thirty years later, her books are still on my shelf.

    I don’t think I’ve been keeping them.

    I think they’ve been keeping parts of me.