I love Sandra Cisneros for her dualities—of our various Americas and of our Americas-of-the-mind. She is the daughter of a Mexican father and a Chicana mother. Cisneros also writes across genres—which is why in spite of her famous fictions, I still get to mention her as a Cinco de Mayo poet.
When I think of Sandra Cisneros (1954-present), I see her poised in the plane bathroom in her poem “Original Sin”—shaving her underarms with a 69 cent razor so that when she lands in Mexico City to see her father’s side of the family, she can “open my arms wide armpits clean/as a newborn’s soul”.
I also think of the day I read her very short story, “Elevens” (which you can read here) roughly eleven times in a row:
when you’ve eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. …Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five…Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.
I don’t know how 11 was for you, but that’s how it still is for me!
-J.F.
Photo Credit: www.sandracisneros.com