An itch is a small thing to build a poem around, but nobody takes one lightly once it won't stop. Anthony Rella's poem begins with its title line, "This maddening itch in my heart is like–", and the dash leaves the sentence hanging. Everything that follows is an attempt to finish it. The poem offers four fragments, each a different answer to what the speaker's longing is like, and as they pile up, the answers change from something poisonous to something mending.
The first attempt is the ugliest. The itch is "poison woven into tissue", then "sepsis radiating from the site / where unspoken words putrefy." The word "tissue" does double work, since it means both flesh and fine cloth, and that quietly prepares the sewing imagery later on. The cause of the infection is silence: words that were never said have gone bad inside the speaker, "in anger and hope" at once. The blood is "anxious for salve", as if the body itself were pleading for relief. Hard sounds like *putrefy* and *toxifying* make the lines feel sour in the mouth.
The second fragment moves from infection to emptiness. Dreams and wishes wither "under reality's hot sun", and then comes the poem's oddest image: "an empty hole in a brick wall / betraying its completion." A wall with a gap shows how solid the rest of it is, so the hole gives away what is missing. Wanting something only becomes visible against a background of having everything else. The line "absence yearning for touch" turns the hole itself into the one who longs, which makes the ache feel less like a mood and more like a physical shape in the speaker's life.
In the third fragment the poem turns to sewing. "Desire unnamed" is the one place where the speaker admits that even they don't know what they want, and the poem never names it. The itch is "the chafing / of which tears the hole wider, / fraying thread and loosening / buttons." The line breaks do some of the damage: "loosening" is left dangling at the end of a line before "buttons" arrives, so the reader feels the fastening give way. Yet the passage doesn't end in ruin. The fabric "compels thorough refashioning", a phrase that sounds more like a tailor than a patient. Here the damage starts to read as the pressure that forces change.
Then the poem turns again. "A deep wound beginning to heal, / pain throbbing and dissolving / per some strange rhythm". The last image is the most hopeful and also the cleverest. Anyone who has had a cut knows that healing itches, so the maddening sensation from the title turns out to be evidence of repair. The phrase "per some strange rhythm" is oddly formal, almost like paperwork, as if the speaker is reading the body's pulse like a chart and finding order in it. And the poem ends with advice: "work / which scratching would undo, / requiring patience, toleration." The word "work" sits alone at the end of its line, a small pause before the speaker admits that giving in to the urge would wreck the repair.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, just short lines of uneven length. Nearly every fragment is driven by an *-ing* word: *radiating*, *withering*, *yearning*, *fraying*, *throbbing*, *dissolving*. Nothing in the poem is finished; every process is still going. The lowercase openings after each full stop also keep the fragments feeling like one continuing thought rather than separate statements. When the closing period arrives after "toleration", it finally closes the sentence the title's dash left open.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses the easy comparison. Longing is usually described as either pain or hope, and here it is shown as both, with the same sensation changing meaning depending on how you read it. The poem doesn't promise that the itch will vanish, only that enduring it without tearing at it may be how the healing gets done.