A sneeze starts Dominique Cyprès's poem, and the answer to it is a budget rather than a blessing. A coworker says *salud*, the Spanish wish for health, but the kindness curdles within a few lines: "stay healthy you / don't want to get sick you / might have to miss work / and that means less money / to pay for the heat." There is no punctuation, and the word "you" sits at the end of two lines, so it can lean forward or backward. The sentence slides from a wish ("stay healthy") to a warning ("you don't want to get sick") without a breath between them. Here, care and economic fear are one and the same.
The second stanza adds weather. Snow is piled so high that the governor has declared a state of emergency, "but the store must stay open." Then comes the line "money is meant to flow", which is oddly watery in a frozen landscape. It sounds like a proverb, said with a shrug, and the poem lets it stand without comment. The coworker's consolation follows: "at least it's not walmart / i work there too." She speaks of working two jobs as a comparison to be won, and "we're better off here trust me" persuades the listener while also reassuring the speaker. The poem mostly reports her voice rather than arguing with it, which makes the resignation more convincing.
The form supports this. Everything is lowercase, even the brand names "target" and "walmart," which flattens them into the background of ordinary life. There is no rhyme and no steady meter. The rhythm is that of overheard talk, in short lines that run on without full stops, the way shifts do. The stanzas are uneven (eight lines, then nine, then six, then eight) and the poem ends in only three lines, as though it has no room left to go on.
The third stanza is where the poem steps back and speaks almost like an essay. "It is a tense moment / when we fail to protest." "Tense" works twice: it describes a political standoff, and it also describes muscles clenching. What the workers cannot say, "our bodies do it for us convulsing / a sneeze a seizure a cardiac event." The unpunctuated list climbs from nuisance to catastrophe in a single slide, and it quietly turns the opening sneeze into the first and mildest protest. "A violent demonstration" can mean a march, but it can also mean a showing, a piece of evidence. The body, in this reading, is both the picket line and the proof.
Then the poem turns to the state, a word that drifts through it. First comes the "state of emergency," which the employer ignores. Next comes "state intervention," which the workers "await" as something rare. When help does arrive, it is small and it works through the employer: a travel ban that forced the store to close, and "the threat of a fine when / someone misses a lunch break." Even this protection reaches the workers as a rule applied to the company, not as concern for them. "Snowed in at target," they are literally stuck, and the verb "await" makes waiting the condition of the whole poem.
The ending is the poem's boldest move: "but if the state doesn't intervene / god knows / our bodies will." "God knows" is a common phrase, but beside the opening *salud* it sounds like a blessing turned dark, a prayer without much hope. The final line has no threat or exclamation. It is a plain prediction, and the flatness makes it feel inevitable.
What makes the poem significant is how it handles a political subject without slogans. It does not give a speech about wages or sick leave. It lets a half-heard conversation near a sneeze show how precarity gets absorbed into everyday talk, in advice, comparisons and reassurance, until the body is the only place left to register the cost. The title's phrase, "the body's politics," is the poem's single large claim, and the small, cold, ordinary scenes around it are what make it believable.