Vikki C.

The Unavoidable Fifth Season

It happens on the other side of love—admiring light as it stares back, into a dim street paved
for one. The rainwashed window never concealing enough—flowers, anomalies, a mouth
built as an exit.

The sick say the ocean is never too far. Bone cliffs eroding with the freest will. Homes,
shelters— a mere idea in the minds of strangers. A place found, and lost again, between
ornaments too close to the edge.

It is here, I’d give my last years to you—as imperfect arrangements, cancelled laughter,
divergent trains—the vineyard passing too quickly out of view.

As this <constraint>—a room wherever you are not.
Visions worth writing on the reverse of prescriptions—substitutes for snow in a stolen globe.

To spread crushed pills over our thinning forms, in the small of my back—as salt, sometimes.
Declare this the only sacred winter. My pelvis a lake that freezes for good. Lilies stripped by
the coldest birth.

The red capsules <to be taken with caution>, you’d empty all— spread as if a panacea, over
every glass pane. Because whatever we look for in a street, a name—reflects a deeper
addiction.

The veins carry away what we don’t deserve. Send it to a priest who lost his faith over a
drawbridge. To the counsellor whose lover chose the reddest rope.

Because the lake out west is green in September, the artist leaves with its victims. Ones that
cannot be curated—only hung out in the mackerel blue evening— a dragonfly tending to the
finer strokes of flight and fall.

Won’t you carry my body home as yours?

Upstairs, your fragrance parting the way back to a kinder war. Because the sequoia was never
there until you inhaled. Loosened the first morning around our necks.

Because the wild is where we vanish. And in leaving, we try to stay—as something missed:
lilacs brimming with rain, Mother’s late lavender, my golden other I can never touch.

Her frayed dress still hugging the hips of another patient. Flesh absorbing more of what
comes neat and unlabeled. The last jasmine replacing the spirit, as we drink through our
lungs. In the whitest rooms of apology, a clarity found through every wine glass, every
occasion, unannounced.

Vikki C. is a "Best of the Net" nominated writer, poet, musician and the author of two poetry collections: The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) and Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press, 2024). Vikki’s poetry, fiction and non-fiction are internationally published/forthcoming in venues such as ONE ART Poetry, Psaltery & Lyre, EcoTheo Review, Dust Poetry Magazine, One Hand Clapping, Boats Against The Current, Ice Floe Press, Stone Circle Review, Black Bough Poetry, DarkWinter Lit, Acropolis Journal, The Belfast Review, and other venues. Vikki was named one of the winners of Black Bough Poetry’s 2024 Chapbook/Collection Contest and will have a third collection published in 2025. She was also a shortlisted finalist in the Jerry Jazz Musician 63rd Short Fiction Contest.