Nothing in "Cavity" actually happens, and that is exactly why it is so frightening. A speaker lies in the dark while a drunken man moves through the house toward her door. He arrives, pats her knee, and leaves her with a pet name. The central idea is that fear can live inside a home, and that its victims learn to survive by performing: here, by pretending to be asleep. The poem was published under the name "Ancient Artifact", and since the text gives us nothing else about the writer, it is best read as what it presents itself as, a single voice caught in a single night.
The opening gesture sets up the poem's logic. The speaker covers her eyes "but not my ears." It is a small, strange choice, and it makes sense once you see that hearing is her early-warning system. Not looking is a way of hiding, but not listening would mean losing track of the danger. So the poem becomes a catalogue of sounds: footsteps that "stomp," a table whose squeak "assaults my ears," a drunken grumble. Even the furniture seems to attack her. Sound is the only thing she lets herself take in, so it is felt as physical injury.
The form carries the same tension. There is no rhyme and no steady meter, and everything is in lowercase, even "i," as though the speaker is making herself as small and quiet as possible. The lines that matter most are the shortest. "i wince" and "i choke" sit alone on their lines, and the line breaks work like flinches. "heart / sinking" is split across two lines so that the heart drops as you read it. Notice too how many verbs describe the body holding itself in: she winces, chokes, forgets to breathe, struggles, swallows. Everything she feels has to be pushed down, and the poem's physical details (the "burn in my throat," the air turning "thick and heavy") show where it all goes.
In the middle comes the only stretch of direct speech, and it changes the poem's sound completely. "stupid woman" appears three times, each followed by a petty complaint: moved belongings, spent money, not being waited for. The repeated phrase works like a drumbeat or a slammed door. The grievances are so trivial next to the dread in the surrounding lines that the contrast does the judging for us. The poem never says who the "stupid woman" is. It could be the speaker or someone else in the household, and the ambiguity lets the insult hang over everyone in earshot. His crude swearing also stands out against the speaker's hushed, restrained narration. He has a voice and she has none.
Then comes the ending, which is chilling because it sounds so gentle. "my chiquita, dreaming so peacefully" is the poem's only tender line, and it rests entirely on a lie she has forced herself to tell. She "force[s]" a groan and rolls over "as though i'm asleep," and her acting works. The irony is painful: he sees peace because she has hidden every sign of terror. The Spanish diminutive suggests someone small or cherished in his eyes, though the poem doesn't say whether the speaker is a child, a partner or someone else. What it does show is that affection and threat can arrive in the same hand, since the pat on the knee is both. After the stomping and cursing, softness is no relief. It is one more thing she has to endure without moving.
The title is worth a second look. A cavity is a hollow, something eaten away from the inside. Judging by the imagery, the poem keeps returning to hollow spaces in the body: the ears that listen, the throat that burns, the chest where the heart sinks. A reader might also hear the word as describing what a life like this leaves behind, a space where ease and safety should be.
The poem's significance lies in its restraint. It does not describe violence. It makes us live inside the minutes before something might happen, and holding our breath along with the speaker is the point. It also gives the last word to him, not her, which suggests she has no way to answer.