Anxiety is hard to describe because it happens inside the body and the mind at once, and "Anxia" tries to describe it anyway. The title is not a standard English word. Judging by the sound, it looks like a shortened or reshaped "anxiety," as if the poet had stripped the word down to something raw. The poem follows one episode of panic from its first flicker to its collapse, and its central idea is that the worst part is not the pain itself. It is the fear that no one will believe the pain is real.
The opening treats anxiety as something that creeps. It starts in "the darkest depths of our minds" as "a mocking echo of nothingness," a striking phrase because an echo needs a sound to bounce off, and here there is nothing. Then comes the virus simile: "it begins to spread / Slowly but painfully." The comparison suggests something invasive, outside our control, and moving from the mind into the rest of the body. The next comparison is the poem's oddest line, likening the feeling to "shaking of an arm or leg." The grammar is rough, but the point is clear enough: this is as impossible to ignore as a limb that trembles.
Water takes over from there, and the poem keeps escalating it. First the speaker is in "a pool of misery and pain," then tears come "in torrents," and finally the speaker needs someone "to silence the tsunami in your soul." The scale grows from pool to flood to tidal wave, which mirrors how panic feels as it builds. The line "No lifeguards can save you this time" is quietly bleak. The word "this time" hints that rescue may have worked before, and now it won't. Words about breath pile up too: "suffocates," "grasp for air," "suffocating," "choking." The poem keeps coming back to the same sensation because that is how panic behaves, circling the same symptom.
The poem is also built around contradiction. It opens with a "numbing feeling," yet by the end it is full of "jabs you feel on your heart." Numbness and sharp pain don't belong together, but anxiety can feel like both, and the poem doesn't tidy this up. It also moves between pronouns. It begins with "our minds," a shared, almost universal voice, then narrows to a pressing "you," which pulls the reader into the experience. The only "I" appears in the final quoted phrase, "I'm sorry," as if the speaker has no first-person voice until the collapse forces one out.
Structurally, this is free verse with no regular rhyme or meter. The lines are short, mostly end-stopped, and read like breaths or sobs. Repetition does the work that rhyme might do elsewhere. Lines begin with "But" to mark each turn for the worse ("But then you grab your chest," "But no one comes"), and "slowly" appears twice, first for the spreading and then for the first tears, before the sudden pour. The poem's most interesting move comes in the middle: "No one will understand / And you don't know how to explain / You don't know how to explain the pain." The repeated line stumbles, as if the speaker is trying to start the sentence again. A loop follows, since "the fear sends an extra jolt of pain." Being afraid of the pain creates more pain.
The ending is the poem's strongest stretch. After the speaker "crumble[s]" and drops "all your defenses," the apology spreads outward: "To nothing / To no one / To everyone / To everything." The list starts with emptiness and ends with the whole world. The speaker apologizes first to no one and finally to everything, as though simply feeling this way were a fault. There's no comfort and no recovery, and the poem stops where the panic leaves off.
The poem matters because of its honesty and its plain language. It gives words to a feeling many readers will recognize but may never have said aloud. It also contains a small irony. The speaker says she cannot explain the pain, yet the poem is an explanation, and a reader who understands it has already answered the speaker's fear.