DEAR ARTIST: IN PLACE OF WHAT I CANNOT SPEAK
This instrument I cannot tune between your ribs.
Inside these shadowlands of birch and pine,
your own svelte tongue ripe with sunlight.
At dusk, smoke and lilacs en route to your body
—you asleep, wild verses across your warm lap,
while I grieve the open book that reads like a love letter.
What hurts more than the politics of a heart
caught between impossible and platonic?
Winters that carry ocean air to the forest,
the deer calling to her fawn—already endangered.
To labour the grasslands, raising our eyes only to weep.
Throwing seeds to the wind to recall smallness as potential,
while I try to forget the fists of peonies you painted.
I think of Proust’s broken vase, splitting twilight in half:
walking out together, bodies sinking into wet meadows
—or leaving alone with violets, for the quiet life by a lake.
Because water is never far from your hands,
a woman’s pelvis is a palette of yearning.
When I say it hurts to open the mouth, it is like bait
to our faces, the hook reeling me in through an emerald.
Everything precious, despite knowing you will cast me back—
a stranger. Return me to the ebbing, vanishing deeper
than intended. Wearing your radiance as mine—
our wound, a reflection—framing the entire cosmos.
Vikki C. is a British-born award nominated writer, poet and musician whose work explores the intersections of ecology, existentialism and the human condition.
She is the author of 'The Art of Glass Houses' (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) and the full-length collection 'Where Sands Run Finest' (DarkWinter Press, January 2024).
Vikki's poetry and stories appear or are forthcoming in places such as EcoTheo Review, The Belfast Review, ONE ART Poetry, Psaltery & Lyre, Black Bough Poetry, Nightingale & Sparrow, Ice Floe Press, Acropolis Journal, DarkWinter Literary Magazine, The Broken Spine, Boats Against The Current, Origami Poems, Mythic Picnic, Loft Books, Salo Press, Igneus Press, Literary Revelations and other venues.
Vikki was named one of the winners of Black Bough Poetry's recent Poetry Collection Manuscript Contest (February 2024). She was also a shortlisted finalist in the Jerry Jazz Musician 63rd Short Fiction Contest. Twitter: @VWC_Writes
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