I cannot vote myself out of this scent. Planting sunflowers, planting children, the same thin place for a woman. A ritual grown from winter’s improbability. Smoke, ice, ancestral fingerprints. Around this cold evidence, planets painted by a noble hand, lanterning the shade. Directing our eyes from a soiled hunger. Spaces of light relief, to birth screamless. The glass has been cold for decades. My lips pressed to its green imaginings, already misted before any invasion. The plants grow as a daughter’s hair — beyond common death. On good twilights, vines reach the height of a lover’s climax. I see my mother’s tresses waterfallen at her hips, before pooling, unassisted. The last recorded summer came thick & flooded. He reminded me of thawing glaciers. Blue china shaken on the mantle of a faultline. After the tremors, I washed my own hair immemorial, asking what could still float above eye-level. The small fish paying for my debts with their silver? The pink coral pleasuring in the absence of flesh? I’d backstroke through our burnished climate. Let the tailwinds shed his possessions over me again. Our bodies glowing in oil & salt. He, a good man for tending reflections. For oversleeping the season with. His hands electing fine rain, cradling the era’s bouquets over my belly.
Vikki C.
Vikki C. is a British-born writer, musician, and author of two poetry collections, including Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press, 2024). Her writing has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Orison Best Spiritual Literature and has appeared in over 70 publications across the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe. Recent venues include The Inflectionist Review, EcoTheo Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, Grain Magazine, Harpy Hybrid Review, Sweet Literary, Cable Street, Feral: A Journal Of Poetry And Art, Amethyst Review, Ballast Journal, New Verse Review, and Ice Floe Press, among others. Vikki was named a winner of the Black Bough Poetry 2024 Poetry Manuscript Contest and was shortlisted in the DarkWinter 2nd Anniversary Contest, judged by Kim Fahner. Her writing and voice have been featured in various podcasts and audio collaborations, which showcase her music and spoken-word craft.
