by Vikki C.
We can come up with a single line
that means so much on the lips of another.
Even along a receding shore, a bird circles
the vague crescent between bay and off-white
and the wind is pastelled in aloneness.
Again, you are asking about my day —
did I sleep well in an unfamiliar bed?
Were there more important things we’d neglected?
How is the evening light after the rain?
It’s easy to say little in reply to one’s golden other,
and still hold them closer than grief,
knowing this love endures the lesser kind.
I don’t know how to pray anymore,
but something tilts my chin skyward.
The errant murmuration and their acrobatics,
a rapture my eyes heed in search of you.
Because its dark mass changes shape too often
to turn from. Because the world
breaks itself open along the same faultline
which splits my chest whenever you fall
from your odd sense of flight.
They keep asking if I believe in angels.
the ones like swans who try the sky on for size
– pulling it over us with the thunder intact.
I pass a botanical garden; a harp plays a line of music
warm and absolute — and Eden is not quite myth.
As if you arrive, bare shouldered and faithful,
the sundial splits dusk to make two of its kind
— and by some soft second chance, I am forgiven.
Vikki C. is a ‘Best of the Net’ award-nominated writer, musician and author of THE ART OF GLASS HOUSES (Alien Buddha Press) and WHERE SANDS RUN FINEST (DarkWinter Press). Vikki’s poetry and fiction are published/forthcoming in venues such as Psaltery & Lyre, The Inflectionist Review, EcoTheo Review, ONE ART Poetry, Stone Circle Review, Ballast Journal, Dust Poetry Magazine, Boats Against The Current, Ice Floe Press, Black Bough Poetry, DarkWinter Lit, The Belfast Review, Acropolis Journal and various others. Twitter: @VWC_Writes Linktree: https://linktr.ee/vikki_c._author
Emerge Literary Journal 