August 2020

Abstract

Unemployed at the time, not visibly disabled, but having become quite unwell in the middle of a pandemic, this poem illustrates my anxious and exhausting insomnia against the caretaking labor for my youngest child. I worked to minimize the projections of stress and anxiety onto her, laboring for stillness and comfort. As Luce Irigaray states in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993), 'Music comes before meaning. A sort of preliminary to meaning, coming after warmth, moisture, softness, kinesthesia' (168).