home> poets> Marina Sánchez poems

about Marina Sánchez       back to Marina’s page           Members’ Events Listing       Shop Online

last update: 27th Nov22

 

 

CHARGE Syndrome                      Bodies of Water

 

Riviera Maya                      Wall

 

CHARGE Syndrome

I’m waiting to hear there’s been a mistake.
The young paediatrician keeps searching
through a medical volume. We’re sitting
in a cramped office outside the heat
of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
 
I’ve just been looking at my daughter
while she squeezed my finger through
one of the incubator’s windows.
Sometimes she opens her eyes and I catch
the light of her violet gaze. My daughter.
 
My daughter. I’ve been repeating
for the last few hours since she was born.
Because of emergencies, she’s still unnamed.
When the doctor finally strikes the page,
she looks satisfied, her suspicions confirmed
 
as though she’s dispelled an awkward mystery.
She says it’s only just been included.
Excited, she talks of odds in tens of thousands.
She’s not sure if there’s ever been one born
in the hospital before. Her news echo
 
like the number of light years to a remote
constellation or hurricane speeds or stars
given numbers instead of names.
She leaves me with the acronym
but I need an explanation, a prognosis,
 
I’ll settle for a wide orb of prediction.
But it was a skilled diagnosis.
We were luckier than those who wait years.
And I have grown used to my questions
landing in medical stillness.
 

Marina Sánchez

in pamphlet collection Dragon Child, 2015, Acumen,
ISBN 978-1-8731614-5-6



back to top

 

Bodies of Water

What if language was a body of water
flowing through us from birth, where we drink,
swim and sail? Or what if through our lives
we needed to learn the ways of another
lake, river or stream, its depth and currents,
 
its temperament through the seasons,
how to read the light and sky
as they shade and shadow water,
how it takes time to feel safe as creatures
that adapt where others belong,
 
whether hugged by mountains,
springing up as an oasis
or aching for the mouth of the river.
What if language was a body of water
where we only stay in the shallows,
 
though we yearn to become more fluent
in our sleek and slender words,
abandoning ourselves, like otters,
to our mother current.
But wherever we paddle or swim,
 
we hear, taste and feel from source to mouth,
that urgent call, so we brave rapids,
plunge down waterfalls and surge
from deep aquifers in barren lands,
unafraid of silence, unafraid of drowning.
 

Marina Sánchez

in pamphlet collection Mexica Mix, 2021, Verve Poetry Press



back to top

 

Riviera Maya

I will not describe how the horizon
is crowded with cranes constructing more
of these thousand-room pyramids.
 
I will not mention the guests who fly
there for sun and those who serve them,
depend on rain water from the wells.
 
I will not question those who still tell stories
of how, after a drought, the Mayans fled,
how the jungle has smothered their pyramids.
 
I will not ask the Giant Sea Turtle,
sacred Akumal, the manatees and
the coral reef, why they fear the waters.
 
I will not say why the growl of the jaguar
is no longer heard as the jungle is
hacked back and bulldozed to build more hotels.
 
I will not write about any of these because
this is a poem about water.
I am writing about water.
 

Marina Sánchez

in pamphlet collection Mexica Mix, 2021, Verve Poetry Press



back to top

 

Wall

I will not describe those who die each year
crossing the Sonoran Desert
from lack of water, sunstroke, wild beasts, coyotes.
 
I will not describe the desert litter
of discarded shoes, clothes, kids’ backpacks,
empty plastic bottles and ladders,
 
the gun shell casings from the Migra,
the snorkels for swimming the Rio Grande.
I will not question those who weave the image
 
of the Virgin of Guadalupe in strips
of paper through the metal posts of the wall,
so that it is visible from both sides.
 
I will not question the naked, female torso
painted on a teal and turquoise background,
to remember the women killed in Tijuana.
 
I will not describe how someone taps, raps, bangs,
hits, knocks and pounds with his hands and sticks
the high steel beams, the colour of dried blood.
 
I will not question how another has brought down
the sky and painted the beach and sea, so that
seen from afar, part of the wall will vanish.
 
 
     Coyotes: smugglers of illegal immigrants
 
     Migra: US Border Patrol

 

Marina Sánchez

published in Un Nuevo Sol, 2019, flipped eye
and in Magma, Resistencia, issue 76



back to top