by Elizabeth Torres

Elizabeth Torres is a poet and essayist in southern Minnesota with work in AGNI, Ecotone, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Visit her at elizabethtorreswriter.com

For screen reader accessibility:

I was obsessed with invisible things, so I bought a dehumidifier and two of the top-rated air purifiers on Wirecutter in the span of a week. I became addicted to the machine’s acceleration each time it detected impurity. Addicted to emptying the basin of water out of the basement three times a day. The invisible made concrete. To being proven right. I cocooned myself in purity, and wondered if I could make a business of breathing all that clean air. Innovation happens at the base. I was already atomized at that point, and dreamed of being self-sustaining, of doing all within my borders, all, of course, being a metaphor for American motherhood. Myth doesn’t mean untrue, but still these things can fall apart if you’re not careful—myth, metaphor, economic theory—take tariffs for example, which should incentivize manufacturing within one’s borders, but depending what you’re making, to confusing results. Like, imagine I were to ask you to rub cocoa butter into my belly where the baby is blossoming above my pelvic bone, if I were to ask you to speak inside me all the words of safety you’ve been taught to believe, to lay your hand and absorb the kicks, to be in this with me, our air so clean, so ridden of questions. If you hold me here, witness my aloneness in my not-aloneness, what have I outsourced that diminishes me? Are you not going to pay, as I’m going to pay?