Vikki C.
Inheritance
How did we learn it without the rooms we first imagined?
The blue nursery to draw first breath, a cradled small saint,
before the dark corridor led us to the spiced chamber and its troubles.
We’re still searching our way out. A thread between you and the next love,
as though myth has animated every statue. When you gesture from that
forsaken atria, I can edge near as any temperate season. Its rosehips
and peonies in the mind, unprepared for a sudden flood. Who walks
on crimson water still remains unproven. I travel against the mourning tide,
gather my belongings, and the bald islands you chart are no longer visible.
Sometimes, I catch my Mother’s tongue, its sharpness disturbing this thick, glossy lake.
A corpse attracts fish, like its duty to nourish, and all the invisible life below
never goes hungry. How do I recite such act in one part, on calved limbs meant for kneeling?
Do we leave in pieces, or not at all? The air darkens, the waters silver.
The thread is most taut, ready to pull us over. Yet here we are—resisting.
Reliable Narrator
It is in the telling as much as the young mother
stitching the fabric of a story to her child’s name.
Fathers debate what makes the collection acceptable.
That it must row itself cooly towards a lesser grief.
My mentor coins the narrative a slow breakup.
The complimentary flowers on the motel bed
where the beloved betrayed every Sunday.
Where faith doesn’t come easy to a preacher.
Because poems possess—part angel or animal.
What approaches, soon backs away into rearview
—tinted and broken. On the wrong highway,
you imagine skin around the found bones.
The poems honour — they cloak and embalm,
filter toxins and perfume the dying.
A river is never far from a casualty,
and pages lily and lantern, but refuse to float in one place.
Because the current keeps moving with your tongue,
lapping as language and dragonfly burr,
the arabesque of a manuscript keeps the reader
from drowning. It’s how we hear through whiplash
and sirens—the opaline lake and its dropped oar;
the body’s duty replaying the nectar of this world.
Vikki C. is a poet, essayist and musician whose work explores eco-conscious themes, heritage, mythology and posthumanism. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction have appeared internationally in venues like The Inflectionist Review, EcoTheo Review, Grain Magazine, The Blue Mountain Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Harpy Hybrid Review, Barren Magazine, Cable Street, Psaltery & Lyre, Sweet Literary, Ice Floe Press, Ballast Journal, Amethyst Review, Sunday Mornings at the River, Dust Poetry and Black Bough Poetry, among others. She was shortlisted in the Bridport Prize 2025 and has been nominated for ‘The Pushcart Prize’, ‘Best of the Net’ and the ‘Orison Best Spiritual Literature’. Vikki is the author of the chapbook The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press, 2022), the collection Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press, 2024), and the hybrid collaboration In The Blueprint of her Iris (Ice Floe Press, 2025). She serves as contributing editor at The Winged Moon Magazine.
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Banner Art:
from The Red Room, Etretat, Félix Edouard Vallotton, 1899
