The Labor Arc

The Answer: because understanding and sewing you up
is the only way i know how to be a woman
The Answer is not like my Anxiety, because it is mine

and mine alone. if i understand The Answer, cradle it,
raise it as my own, i’ll be loved as a child loves
a mother cautiously; i think, but cannot say, you’re

the bravest person i’ve ever met, with gashes
on your knees, scabbed over
like summer strawberries

we talk and talk like spinning
pathologized-gold-thread from straw-silence,
as if my words and sounds are a massage

soothing beasts who are truly and naturally
beasts whom i have no business taming
but i try anyway

massaging Anxiety into submission, until i hear
a purr; but the waiting cat still sheaths and unsheathes
its claws in my carcass

as my gold heart-thread tumbles
out and forms a thicker bolt of fabric
imbued with the value of a woman’s attention,

the labor of love made currency
after all these years, coarse yet effective,
efficient–how else do we stop the guts

of the world from spilling out? god
thought a lot about that conundrum,
about the ribbon from that fabric tied in a wilting bow

around The Answer, my gift to no one but my own
Anxiety, who accepts, crumples it
between hands swollen dry with salt water,

and one day, curling at the foot
of our bed, whispers, “I whine and moan because
you are never happy,

so you are never present.”

Artwork by Richard Tuschman