Vikki C.

Your Name A Sermon I Count On

We’re sleepless in territories we cannot measure.
Imagine a flood’s impurities, a vista’s thinning myth,

rewriting our wills with a blue wind. Ask a train’s
carriages what oaths they transport through a war.

And what erosion means to the traveller, dying
to be singular. Their only tension, a fractaled

skin of amnesia. Memory growing wild,
in its own plot, its own therapy & resistance.

Seeing the other in the charcoal shade of her skirt,
in the blank sail gliding bright in the straits of refuge.

We intuitively tell a story in first person plural
because the jewelled soil was made to listen.

Open field, open water. A little crystal in the plains.
All its men at work, just to salvage your self-portrait.

By first snow, a heartland forgets its girl-rivers.
No sign of passage — save for agate & fine bone

you count from afar; fish, heron, floating lovers.
We startle ourselves with our latitude. In redeeming,

years of delicate attention along each vertebra
— glacial fingers rounding to the nearest miracle.

Vikki C. is an award-nominated writer & author of The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) & Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press, 2024). Vikki’s poetry & prose appear or are forthcoming in Psaltery & Lyre, The Inflectionist Review, Stone Circle Review, EcoTheo Review, Amethyst Review, Ballast Journal, New Verse Review, Sweet Literary, Ice Floe Press, Harpy Hybrid, Cable Street, New Feathers Anthology, Boats Against The Current, ONE ART Poetry, The Hyacinth Review, Dust Poetry Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, DarkWinter Lit & Acropolis Journal, among others. Her writing has been nominated for ‘Best of the Net’, 'The Pushcart Prize' & the ‘Orison Best Spiritual Literature.’