Squire's poem is about a relationship in which love, control and self-worth are so tangled that the speaker can't separate them. The poem never explains who "she" and "he" are or how they met. It gives us a few gestures and a cigarette, and from these we sense a dependence that is hard to name. Her love is described, but she never says it aloud. His love is never described, but it leaks out anyway.
The opening shows how much the poem does with very little. "she was in love / but in the end she'd never say" ends on a hanging verb, and then comes a stanza break before the sentence continues: "she could ever hate him." The gap enacts the silence the lines describe. Read one way, she will never admit she could hate him. Read another, she will never say she loved him. The missing punctuation (the poem is lowercase and has no full stops at all) lets both readings stand.
The middle section is where the poem gets unsettling. He "kept her from believing / that she was nothing" and "reminded her always / of her worth." On the surface that sounds tender, even protective. But look at what follows: "he cared little / and it was clear / to him / that she always would belong." The line break after "clear" and then "to him" gives the phrase a double function. It can mean "it was clear to him," but it also hooks onto "belong," so she belongs *to him*. Squire lets possession creep in through line-break placement rather than through any loud statement. The repeated "always" (he reminds her "always," she "always would belong") makes both his kindness and his ownership sound like permanent conditions rather than choices.
The title tag, «cigarettes | day 30 | reverse», reads like a label from a daily writing project, though that is my inference from the wording. "Reverse" seems to be an instruction, and it rewards being taken literally. If you read the lines from the bottom up, the poem opens on its closing images: "a confession of love slips / between his loosened lips," and then moves back through "a pattern on her skin" to "that she always would belong / to him." Further up the chain, the meaning of the central lines flips. Reversed, we get "he cared little / of her worth / reminded her always / that she was nothing." The same words that comforted now wound. Whether Squire designed the poem to work in both directions is not something I can confirm, but the tag invites the experiment, and the experiment shows how thin the line is between being reassured and being diminished by the same person.
The imagery is concentrated in the last four lines. "Marking with his hands / a pattern on her skin" could describe a caress, a finger tracing shapes. Placed directly before "the cigarette that burns," though, "marking" picks up a darker undertone, and "burns" sits at the end of its line with a menace that the next line, "between his loosened lips," only partly softens. The poem never states harm, and judging by the imagery it doesn't need to. The reader supplies the unease.
The only real rhyme arrives at the very end: "lips" and "slips." Until then the poem is free verse, short and uneven, close to speech. The sudden chime works like a click. The confession of love is "slipped," not offered, as if he would never choose to say it. The "loosened" lips suggest a lowered guard, a moment when something true escapes along with the smoke. Smoke itself, vague and drifting, stands in for everything unsaid in the relationship.
What makes the poem worth studying is its restraint. It doesn't tell us whether this is love, abuse, or something that belongs to both words. It doesn't judge either person. Instead it shows how someone can be told they matter by the same voice that tells them they belong to someone else, and how the one confession that counts arrives by accident. That refusal to resolve things is what lingers after you finish reading, and it is why the poem repays a second look, forwards or backwards.