Mari Sánchez Cayuso

Tag: survival

  • Heel Against the Dark

    My mother says I started kicking early.

    By six months
    I was restless enough
    that she was sure I was a boy.

    She did not know.

    She only knew
    there was something inside her
    that would not be still.

    Sometimes I think about that
    and feel tired
    all the way back to the womb.

    As if I arrived here already working.
    Already pushing.
    Already trying to make more room
    than there was.

    Before I had opened my eyes
    before air
    before language
    before anybody had asked anything of me—

    I was moving.

    Heel against the dark.

    Again.

    Again.

    Again.

    Maybe that is why rest
    has always felt slightly unnatural to me.

    Like I have forgotten something.

    Like somewhere
    there is a door unlocked
    a problem awake
    a person waiting
    a thing I should be carrying.

    I have spent so much of my life
    with my hands full
    that I do not know
    what they look like empty.

    I solve.
    I hold.
    I stay.

    I lie awake beside problems
    as if they have fevers.

    Turn them over.
    Touch their forehead.
    Listen for breathing.

    And when they do not tell me what is wrong

    I stay anyway.

    People call women like this strong.

    I think sometimes
    that is just what they call us
    when they have become accustomed
    to watching us carry things.

    They stop seeing the weight.

    They see only
    that we have not dropped it.

    Maybe I have been doing this
    longer than anyone knows.

    My mother
    hand against her stomach
    feeling me kick
    and kick
    and kick

    thinking
    there must be a son in there.

    No.

    It was me.

    Already exhausted
    from trying to move a wall
    with a foot the size of a plum.

    God.

    Imagine being that small
    and already believing
    something has to give.

    Imagine having no language for being trapped
    no idea what survival is

    and still
    your body knows:

    push.

    Tonight I do not feel strong.

    I do not feel brave.

    I feel ancient
    in a way that has nothing to do
    with years.

    I feel tired
    from before my own beginning.

    As if somewhere inside me
    that unborn self is still awake

    still pressing a heel
    into the dark

    not asking anymore
    if there is room—

    only pressing

    as if the body
    has always known

    that sometimes
    the only way
    to survive a wall

    is to keep becoming
    against it.

  • 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 myself

    and still come up
    breathing.

  • 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.