“Asthmanaut” evokes the experience of an asthma exacerbation through the metaphor of an astronaut navigating the thin air between Earth and outer space. The speaker, struggling to “[t]ake strangled sips,” describes feeling as though he were “[i]n [a] vacuum,” “pull[ed]” by the gravity of stars as he attempts to return to Earth. Through vivid images and descriptive phrases, the poem conveys the substantial morbidity of this disease. Nevertheless, the speaker does not merely describe the almost surreal experience of an asthma exacerbation but also reproduces the sensation of dyspnea through the poem itself. Form and content reflect one another in numerous ways: the lines are short, invoking shallow breaths, and the poem’s visual outline resembles an alveolus or branching airway. Additionally, the frequent use of alliteration, onomatopoeia, harsh consonants, and multisyllabic words (eg, “lungs filched, folded/excoriated”) induces labored breaths while reading the poem aloud, which are accentuated by the lack of punctuation, aside from commas. Fortunately, the sounds and images at the end of the poem become more euphonic as the speaker describes “[coming] down/…to stoop and kiss the earth//And savor one sweet gulp/of atmosphere.” The poem subsequently invites us to complete the journey of the asthmanaut by simulating the breath of relief that the speaker imagines. Returning to Earth along with the speaker, who invokes weightlessness by omitting a concluding period, we float (if only temporarily) “unhounded.”
