Faster. Fast. The  face’s fractured fragments realign.
Her jaw snaps back in place, locks itself home, safe
between its boney condyles. The woman on the floor
at the foot of the stairs rises in the air.
Her vision clears; the stars retreat
like Perseids at moonrise. Her blood
unpuddles from the baseboard
at the linen closet’s door. The woman’s teeth
dive from the folded sheets on the bottom shelf,
surprised by their speed, skid under the crooked space
where the door fails to meet the floor,
and with a hard bounce, vault into their sockets.
The woman’s split lips seals like a tire
plugged by a roadside Samaritan.
The linen closet door opens, pushes the woman’s
head away, propels her body up the stairs.

This is where we thought she was rearranging furniture
in the night. Her limbs helicopter her up the stairs
where the little girl waits. Halfway up the stairs,
the woman’s peach nightgown settles,
no longer bunched  like a needy child
around her neck. At the landing, the woman stands.
In the dark, she  jerks her floating foot from the air
and plants it. Barefoot, she walks  backwards
to the little girl’s bed room.  The girl’s nightmare
is mist in the chimney. She sleeps, no longer thirsty.
Her “Mommy could you get me some water” echoes,
a quantum thought in the event continuum
of the girl’s life, that blackhole
from which nothing remembered will escape.

This is where I stop dreaming in reverse: the mother
crawling into bed with the daughter, the quilt pulling
itself up from the foot of the bed, each square
holding them there, arresting their orbits
like glue.

Ann Chinnis was born and raised in Virginia. She has been an Emergency Physician for 40 years, as well as a Department Chair and a healthcare leadership coach. Ann has been a poetry student at the Writers Studio in New York since January 2017 and currently lives in Virginia Beach. Her poetry has been published in The Speckled Trout Review.