Stillborn
By Rachel Chitofu
For a bit, the air forgets
how to be air—clings to fire
like sand to inner thigh.
I feel my soul tiptoe up my throat.
Tie her to the scaffold. Old hag, loose-winged.
Don’t move, I whimper, steadying
the knife in one hand.
I'm afraid.
There isn’t enough Heaven
to hold all this weeping.
A tree floats past on slow wind—I tattoo
him my name. By spring, the wound is gone.
Breath.
Then less.
Then a question of breath.
A flower overhead
drips blood. Its fangs curl,
tired of beauty.
A mouth opens, smokes itself shut.
Every blow steals
one more second from the clock
thrumming behind your ribs.
Artist’s Statement
Stillborn came from a place where fear, grief, and faith kept colliding inside me. I wrote it during a time when everything in my life felt fragile: My mind, my dreams, my identity, even my sense of belonging in the world. I wasn’t responding to one event; I was responding to the accumulation of quiet heartbreaks that I brushed off at the time I was experiencing them. The poem became a way to name the heaviness I sometimes carry as a young Black woman, a medical student, and someone trying to survive emotional wounds that don’t leave visible scars.
When I write, I’m often thinking about the tension between endurance and collapse. The world keeps demanding us to hold ourselves together, to be productive, and appear “fine”—even when we’re quietly bleeding. In Stillborn, I wanted to capture that moment when the air itself starts to feel wrong, when you’re hovering between breath and no breath, between choosing yourself and surrendering to the weight. The images, such as fire refusing to loosen its grip, a flower growing fangs, a tree tattooed with a name, are my way of showing how beauty can warp under suffering, and how suffering can twist even the gentlest things.
If the reader feels anything, I hope it’s recognition. Not pity, just a moment of “I’ve been near that edge too.” I want them to notice the small violences we survive daily and the strength it takes to return to our bodies afterward. The poem is dark, but it’s also a kind of prayer: my attempt to breathe again.
Rachel Chitofu, 23, is a Zimbabwean medical student and poet based in Harare. She recently placed third in the Katrina Collins Poetry Prize and won the New Coin Poetry Prize in 2021.
