by Vikki C.
I tell him how language has failed me— and I’ve abandoned my form.
How the remains drag on in entrails—yet we’re told composure matters.
That the subject has to stand tall—a lily or some graceful reckoning.
So I avoid describing it, because I fear collapse is clichéd.
He opens the window. I say the smell of rain is complicated too—
impossible to distil—except the nostalgia of long grass giving charity
to so much more than is apparent. Beings harboured in-between,
that we try to carefully step over, instead of killing.
That it is a condition beyond a surface or a crooked spine.
We cradle a volume of grief, handpicked by an equally troubled editor.
Or maybe they too just miss flesh and its irrationality at sunrise.
Waking to the privilege of showering in slow company—
the suds foaming wild on the tide of another’s body.
It’s hard because a muse is a much closer distraction than planned.
—as if I knew how to lie, about my cherry-stained dress,
or how the knife is just another blunt metaphor.
We know the duality of love and war is governed by counsel.
Because both myth and truth haunt every turn, a field of honey
comes with the price of being stung. And death sparkles in the eyes
of every prey—consoling me of my own unbelonging.
The tsunami I run from is what nourishes the fatigued barley.
Acres of a far larger plot begging to be bathed in saltwater.
It’s almost healing. A vision of pale horses kicking up a shoreline
of crystal light that seems much further than imagined—
from any gallery or dark library where others tried and failed too,
leaving behind fibres that never loved them back.
When you finally open the door, it is like a coming out—of flesh
—and a letting in of something, like a spirit.
I try to explain, “the fragrance of”—
as the doctor writes a new pill prescription
—“two together, before sleep.”
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 