by Vikki C.
It’s a harsh instrument, the sound of what is already leaving.
Still, we make metal into music — snow, rain, wind on abandoned roofs
in deep country. You drive without talking, one hand pointing to the vanishing mountain,
the other cradling three thousand years of trouble, in case the Earth shatters at a wrong turn.
In silence, we find excuses to travel closer, like it might be home.
I’d remake myself for you too. Take off the history of this mask
which weighs a crude approximation of death. Let things break the limits.
Stain the headlights.
Falter where the chords drop an octave to our ancestors’ voices.
Harmonies bleeding from a falcon’s throat into our veins.
It’s that dreaded storm again. The one which brings the scent of violets
that shouldn’t be in bloom.
Because the road ahead is black silk.
You want to know where it falls away.
Where the limbs of a woman end on any given winter.
When the white sheet thrown over her body might be lifted.
Any man would want to know. Why percussion persists in a place
where no tools exist to fix the wreckage that surrounds.
Why breathing over ice changes the state of such matter.
And why the orange carp, neck strangled in seagrass, mouth agape,
pushes back beneath the freeze — still searching for the bait.
::
Vikki C. is a British-born ‘Best of The Net’ nominated author, poet and musician, writing at the intersections of science, ecology, existentialism and the human condition. She is the author of THE ART OF GLASS HOUSES (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) and WHERE SANDS RUN FINEST (DarkWinter Press) a full-length collection released in January 2024. Vikki’s work appears or is forthcoming in EcoTheo Review, The Belfast Review, ONE ART Poetry, Ice Floe Press, Black Bough Poetry, Nightingale & Sparrow, Acropolis Journal, The Broken Spine, Boats Against The Current, DarkWinter Literary Magazine, Origami Poems, Mythic Picnic, FeversOf, Loft Books, Literary Revelations, Salo Press, Igneus Press, Ellipsis Zine, Across The Margin, The Write-In (National Flash Fiction Day) and other venues. She was a shortlisted finalist in the Jerry Jazz Musician 63rd Short Fiction Contest (August 2023).
Image: Knut Troim
ID: black road and snowy hills.
Psaltery & Lyre 