In Reverse

by Rachel Chitofu

We already learn something we didn't ask to learn today.
Listen—
to the clatter of a salad bowl in the sink,
Michelle tossing it empty, her hand a dismissal.
If the sink were a hearth, it would hold invisible howls.
 
She moves away,
her freshly washed hair a damp whip,
a belt pulled tight against an unseen body.
 
Blue spills across the floor,
not water, not light—a stain spreading.
 
They say your name in reverse
sounds like blood leaving a mouth.
The seed of temptation works its way out,
tearing the skin open from the inside.
Lymph swirls in the abyss of a wound,
and the heart stammers its old, tired prayer.
 
To guide you home,
we flip the moon onto its glistening back.
Ants pour from its soil, silent, endless.
 
The flag, bored through by asteroids,
rears up—a maddened white horse,
stippled in ink-red bullet wounds.
Nothing waves here.
Not even surrender.

Rachel Chitofu is a medical student and poet whose work has been published or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, Dark Thirty Poetry Publishing, San Pedro River Review, Wayne Literary Review, and Pacific Review. She won Rhodes University’s New Coin Poetry Prize in 2021. Her poetry explores themes of identity and isolation, blending the personal with the universal.