by Anne Boyer
I thought I was telling a joke when I woke up from surgery and said, to the sirens of the ambulance, "Beyonce," but it came out weirder, like a poem. And if I hadn't been a poet, none of these precise events--the art project or political experiment of caring for a really sick person who is not an easy fit in existing structures of care--could have happened. Its actualization had something to do with the way that the arts mix up the classes, that sometimes people in them have some family money and also have the political and social good sense to give it away. It had something to do with the way the people I loved live their lives--even that their lives are precarious, as mine often was--that they don't have property to tend to or big careers and can sometimes just pick up and leave. It had a lot to do with how poets are, at least the ones I've always liked--reckless with spirit, maybe, and love, and political experimentation, familiar with exciting modes of sacrifice. It's not hard to imagine how it could have gone different, if I had just been who I was and not a poet, too.
Everywhere, somehow, this catastrophe was met by a provisionally formed and unexpected kind of care. This is not the case for so many people--women especially and women without money the most--who are abandoned or made to care for others when they need the care themselves. Who gets cared for and why is the most political of questions, its answer structured not just by the gendered division of labor, but by white supremacy, too, and class society and its violences, like how incarcerated people who are sick or disabled exist in the multiplied abandonment created by capital, how trans and non-binary people are often denied necessary care. And who does the caring--both the waged and unwaged kind--is also so often determined by these systems, the burden of the unwaged work of care so generally and disproportionately falling on all but the wealthiest women.
Read the full essay on the Poetry Foundation website.