The sink is flowing with four-day-old dishes,
the stench of wet rot stinkin’ up the kitchen.

The tap water glides along the edge
of protruding plates, so I use my stomach

as a barrier and my shirt as a sponge to stop
the spill. It’s okay, I tell myself,

I needed to do laundry anyway. My body is being
a bitch; wrist aching

from writing resumes, and neck
numb from the doomscrolling I did

to numb the rejection. I push through.
The sharp steel shield of my pots and the blunt

sword-handles of my pans look like the dead
weapons of a war zone—covered

in the pus of watered-down turmeric,
in the bloodied dust of powdered paprika.

I am the lowly soul who must clear these lands,
who must clean the face of grief. No one tells you

that goodness is dirty work, that life is a test
of endurance, and only the freaks

make it out alive.
As the warm water floats atop

the lowered dish-level of the sink,
the lather on a fork tells me:

There is a poem here. How sick and
human must I be

to search for meaning where there isn’t any?
To yearn for magic in the mundane?

I tuck this thought into the cuff of my wet sleeves,
and scrub on. Scrub, scrub, scrub ‘til

I finally see the drain
again. The battlefield is clear

save for one shield. One steel lid.
With my palms shriveled into pale raisins, neck

gone, and wrist aching more than before, I bring
the silver disk level with my face, and see myself.

---

Cypher (she/her) is a self-taught and community-taught brown, queer, and working-class Tamizh diaspora writer in Canada. Her writing is musical, political, philosophical, and introspective. Her work has been featured by Button Poetry, Lit Fox Books, Wildscape Literary Journal, OTHERSIDE, FeelsZine, and several other publications.

Cypher’s first full-length poetry collection, The Self is an Ocean, is out now with DarkWinter Press. Buy it here!

Instagram: @cypherspace_101
Substack: @cypherspace001
Website: cypherspace.ca