Worry is usually described as a feeling. Tara Moghadam's poem treats it as an animal, and a hungry one. Waking brings no relief: "when you wake / you are swimming in it." The "it" is never named, so the pronoun makes worry feel like an element, something already all around you before you have had time to think. The central idea is that worry is physical, nocturnal and insatiable, and that its logic is hard to argue with. Follow it to the end and you arrive at things that are true: houses rot, bodies fail, everyone dies.
The poem builds this with one dominant image, a shark. The oddest phrase is "bathtub belly." A bathtub is small, domestic and meant for comfort, so putting a predator in one, or making the stomach a tub, gives a sense of something enormous trapped in too little space. The poem never settles whether the shark is in the water around the sleeper or inside the body, and that blur suits a feeling that cannot be located. "A mind in sparks" adds an electrical, misfiring note before the jaws arrive. In "bite clinched," the spelling suggests a clenched jaw, but "clinched" also means settled for good, like a deal closed. The bite has already made its decision.
Sound does much of the work. "Sparks" and "shark" are not a true rhyme, only a near-echo, which leaves the ear slightly unsatisfied. In "tail thrashing tight churned circles," the hard t's and crowded stresses make the line difficult to say, and the difficulty feels like churning. Then "dark fin slicing moonlight thin" lengthens into hissing s sounds and the narrow "i" vowels, so the line itself seems to cut. The next image, "teeth like a row of iced knives," gets a line to itself. It is the only plain simile in a run of metaphor, and it is the one image that holds still. After all that thrashing it feels like a chill.
Formally, the poem is free verse. It has no regular meter, no capital letters and no full stops, so the thought never officially ends. Short couplets are broken by single lines, and the shape on the page looks restless. The dashes in "each night—night, after night—" make the repeated word stumble, the way an insomniac turns over the same hour. "The darkness spins" then quietly echoes the earlier "circles."
At this point the shark disappears and the poem changes register. "The house rots, the body too" is flat and factual, with no figurative language at all. The vivid panic of the first half has settled into calm certainty, and that may be the more frightening of the two. The next line breaks across a stanza gap: "even your children" hangs for a moment before the sentence completes it, "are destined to grow old / and die." The worry reaches from the house to the body to the next generation. Judging by "your children," the "you" may be a parent, though the second person also draws the reader in. Worry is also given a source of authority that is not reason: "your belly knows." The knowledge sits in the gut, below argument, so it cannot be talked out of anything. Worry becomes a kind of creditor that "demands your share of the pain / every step of the way," collecting its suffering in advance.
The last image is the most open: "a stone crossing the river / at rising tide." One reading is that the stone is a stepping stone, the footing you need to get across, which is slowly being covered by water. Another is that the speaker is the stone, heavy and carried along or sinking. Either way, the water of the opening line returns, and "every step of the way" now suggests that each step lands on something going under. The poem stops mid-crossing, with no full stop and no rescue.
The poem is significant because it makes anxiety understandable without making it comfortable. It gives the reader a shape for something shapeless, and it shows how worry actually moves, from the lurid to the mundane and then to the inevitable. It does not offer a cure. It holds a mirror up to the sleepless hours and trusts the image to do the work.