May Twentieth
by Sunny Marble
Three days out of surgery,
I carried a newborn home.
My husband was summoned back to work.
The apartment held only me and someone still rehearsing breath.
Then the sutured wound split open.
Fluid crossed the carpet, learning the weave.
I made no sound. No door knew my blood.
Voicemails arrived from my hometown:
my sisters speaking with my mother’s want—
Send money to Mom.
Not one syllable asked where I hurt.
That afternoon, something in me emptied.
Even the building’s hot water quit.
Chicken broth returned to the stove each night.
Greens drifted through it, never softening.
Mold gathered in the kitchen.
Insects found the sheets.
Coil by coil, the mattress surrendered;
my spine fell through itself until morning.
I bought a plank of wood,
wedged it beneath me, and slept on its refusal.
The plank also hurt.
For years the scar stayed cold.
I kept my hands away—
an unwitnessed afternoon lived there, sealed.
Until my daughter left for college.
Then I lifted my hand out of that cold
and laid it on my own belly.
Silence first. Then heat—
a word held too long beneath the tongue, released
Today is May twentieth.
In the language I first learned,
the numbers sound like wǒ ài nǐ—I love you.
By the window, roses brightened; mint opened the air.
The stain on the carpet never flowered.
It became a sentence worked into the weave.
All these years,
it had been reading me.
Sunny Marble is a writer, poet, and essayist with a background in environmental research who later turned to writing full-time. She calls one strand of her literary practice Bodyheld Landing, which explores how recognition, language, and repeated acts of reorientation can reshape our relationship with the self, others, and the world. More about her work can be found at https://sunnymarble.carrd.co.