Vikki C.

@vikkicwrites.bsky.social

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IN THE BLUEPRINT OF HER IRIS 2nd edition (IceFloe Press 2026) WHERE SANDS RUN FINEST (DarkWinter Press 2024) Bridport Prize 2025 shortlist. Pushcart, Forward Prize, BOTN, Best Spiritual Lit nominee Guest Editor: IceFloe Press linktr.ee/vikki_c._author

Logo for The Glacier with text: The Glacier Poetry for the Coming Ice Age
Image showing part of Acropolis Journal's home page with logo and banner.
Aubade for Antartica Finally, you come to rest in the only place. Where to be still is the only way to stay. An unknowable plane of maybe goodness, a fluorescence that reflects its own face. The face you cannot look at too long, else risk losing sight. So you trust that it’s there —the once light-bearer, now the source of a fever dream you have not dreamt. The fever an irony — sub-zero and numb at first, like most dying. A cymbal of timezones clashing in abeyance, unveiling what we need from hereon as glaciers retreat and we inspect what sustained our many selves from afar. There are no others, not you — nor the image of you, so I learn — at last — to slow my heart, enough to preserve what’s left of our post-diluvian wreck. It seems a useful plot to adapt — if we could — to exit with grace where there is no dusk, only a glaring white sentence. Then, the opposite for six months. Enough to miss the blinding. I see what I don’t see. Figures of penguins huddled into those once loved — though they seem one and the same now. An anonymity waiting to enter the realm where the rest slips into sleep. But don’t think of this as dormancy. Just seduction to the next place, I think, where our bodies might touch again. Where the flush of dawn that isn’t here, must be waiting.
Cover art by Manish C. Pathak for Elsewhere: A Journal of Place 'The End of the World'.
From within my bodily singularity By Julia Fiedorczuk Translated By Bill Johnston From within my bodily singularity I play at sending out gentle sunbeams. I don't believe in myself, but in someone else who comes to visit by chance or because they want to: afloat on the waves close to the boat one sweltering morning, the large turtle did not swim away at once—was it curious about us too? dolphins came by all summer, swallows built their mud nests on the walls of the house. I believe in what I am afraid of, what could eat me, and will: after death, a turtle can be home to a dozen families. a human before death is home to tiny beings, feeds its own end so that bare life can swim on, assuming any color it wishes. in the woman with the orange umbrella, when summer's over and we're in Warsaw, I believe. through her I'm my own self entirely differently, through him, through you. and in this rain: since the drops fall from the sky, fall from the roof, fall from the trees, their unstoppable flight is the essence of my freedom.
SELF-PORTRAIT OF A GRIEF BYPASS It happens mostly to another woman, spine suppler, in a class I am forced to swallow, told not to ask the precise moment the bridge, the gulls, the public pool became one hard emergency. Meaning you could sit alone, legs dangling, dreaming of the field, but never roll its brittle gold in your mouth. Love letter dappling tropical waters, and no way to revive the sender. It’s the same patient life; before names, kinder sleeping arrangements, like fanned ribbed shells, half open to a lid of light. And how no one comes to Land’s End anymore. Not even those who can’t stand their own breath. It is in the compression of air, says the doctor, as the surgeon lifts the beating cherry heart clean out of the cavity—like a premature newborn, attaching it to a new hydraulic anthem. Meaning, the system has failed, but can still thrash. I say I am only here to learn the theory of beauty, not to hold it nor take it home. If there was still a home to return to. It was there, then not—money—the catch and release of the designer dress that made me seem unclean. Where I’m writing under the influence; a white curtain falling before I can examine the drop. Towards the end, it was not my flatline. Nor my father laid supine like a cloaked horizon. Just a falling out with the soft yellow grasses or how to tie our wrists to the horses that bolt north—a whole coastline foaming at the mouth. We rolled our sleeves in consent. A skyline of poppies purged of crimson. Translucent bodies blown to where there was no edge. No particular sharp instrument. No cruel way to choose you.
The Thing About Flowers Is the meditation of their roots. How the stems take up water slowly. Each day, the level goes down. We witness the unnoticeable by looking from a private angle. Gaze at the poet, the lover’s face, past the em dash and mid-age silence—you’ll find that sudden thirst —the loose fist of it, just before it was cut and mummified in a thin-necked vase. Now there’s only protest—whole fields that miss what has been cultivated from their temporary skins. Thing with a flower is you can’t set it free like a butterfly or fox, witness it survive and remember what saved it from too many afflictions. Soft and grieving, and in some animal language, thanking you for perverse protection. Flowers give themselves entirely. Just as seeds propagate with violence. We were the perfect flushed magnolia, only witnessed at ground level. Now industry sets its chemical sickness down along some major artery that transports life essentials. Tomorrow, I’ll lay the last bouquet you gave to dry. Each of us drowning in potpourri on separate occasions, trying to cancel the sulphur from our lives. The one you miss is the one you never believed—a mind hypnotised by deer weaving through needle-thin birches—wondering the scent of our real aspirations. Would they still arrive at our front porch? Come close to where marigolds thrive inside a dead goat’s skull. Would their offspring attempt to consume the flowers’ buttery crowns? Could any of them forgive us for what we stole?
Once (2026) - part of a bw photo series by Vikki C.
Black and white photo collage entitled 'Summer on the road, again' by Vikki C. A meditation on time, memory and place.
'Postdiluvian' by Emma Bolden in Verse Daily — originally published in Asheville Poetry Review. #poetrycommunity #WritingCommunity
Morning Star C. D. Wright 1949 –2016 This isn’t the end. It simply cannot be the end. It is a road. You go ahead coatless, light- soaked, more rutilant than the road. The soles of your shoes sparkle. You walk softly as you move further inside your subject. It is a living season. The trees are anxious to be included. The car with fins beams through countless oncoming points of rage and need. The sloughed-off cells under our bed form little hills of dead matter. If the most sidereal drink is pain, the most soothing clock is music. A poetry of shine could come of this. It will be predominately green. You will be allowed to color in as much as you want for green is good for the teeth and the eyes.
A copy of In the Blueprint of Her Iris, opened face down next to two oranges with an avocado balanced on top. A handwritten journal and pen are partially seen above the book.
White blossom tree on a wooden terrace with green metal chairs and railing. Some of the petals have fallen.
Banner of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place plus a testimonial by Robert Macfarlane as seen on the journal's About page.
Respiration By Jamaal May A lot of it lives in the trachea, you know. But not so much that you won’t need more muscle: the diaphragm, a fist clenching at the bottom. Inhale. So many of us are breathless, you know, like me kneeling to collect the pottery shards of a house plant my elbow has nudged into oblivion. What if I sigh, and the black earth beneath me scatters like insects running from my breath? Am I a god then? Am I insane because I worry about the disassembling of earth regularly? I walk more softly now into gardens or up the steps of old houses with impatiens stuffed in their window boxes. When it’s you standing there with a letter or voice or face full of solemn news, will you hold your breath before you knock? Source: Poetry (January 2016)
Artwork by Robert Frede Kenter that accompanies "For Love, We Attempt Another Ars Poetica".
Unsolicited Press logo.
June, waves sharp at my ankles — after Elizabeth Bishop Once drawn to a purple empire; low-fog & clinging krill, transparent small lives hidden from big agendas, the shallows glazed like an ancient flambé vase, just after firing — & I wonder of beauty & utility. What oil, what salt may it hold without damage? A knife pares the length of a trout, limp & constellated, its cloudy-eye roaming as if I have answers to the terrible heat, but I too am caught off-guard, pungent evening coming in fast, indistinguishable from the flats that once assured I stood at the right place, men bending, appraising the day’s dwindling take, bodies flecked & flown, like new-lost treasure. — Vikki C.
Laurie Sheck [Did not forsee] The mind is a thing deeply marked. I have bound myself to this damage. Most delicate and difficult Strangeness, I have abandoned the idea of being Warm. There’s a strictness in the ice charged with its distinct breakages, Hard and beautifully detached, —water once so blue polished to a sheen until it’s heightened And unlike itself. Outside, cold hills. The sky steel-colored, then duller in parts, the gray of smudged newsprint. I did not forsee How this becoming is a reckless and incautious thing. The ice Grows intricate where the stresses fall.
Vikki C.
For each absence, I gave it a voice “There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain.” — Wallace Stevens In this country, I unfold missing speech; The stressed outline of trees, a birdless fall, Though sometimes, I lose control, & Chekhov’s gun is misfired; the reader becomes the book, becomes the border-guard, In Russia, peaches still slacken Against a liquid-noon, lilts the uncle Who long fled. Hunger approximates An erased purple-steep. Even the mean of joy. A vantage-point where the Judas goat Is swallowed, the bald-green evening Flooding what should’ve been home, As the true poem delves beneath gleaming opal. Vikki C.
Scrivener 48 Summer Feature page
Skylight 47, Issue 21, plus 2 poetry postcards featuring same cover design.
MORNING PASSAGES “Flowers at once religious, secular, and sexual.” —Saskia Hamilton, All Souls The body sometimes rescued, often caught, a fish left dripping with street voices: bronze accents, forearms draped in linen, a hand stroking a luminous canary. Salt palming my thigh as he eyes another artist. His oils smeared, the bird becomes a cage. Summer-long, the air-conditioner blew through the Temple of Dionysus. Lilies clouding in a Byzantine bowl. Crack of museum-light revealing a vessel, liquored as our throats. Your mouth as a guide. Affection, like all displays. The admiration, mostly one-way. Vikki C.
Solstice, Santorini caldera In crossing, I reach who I must become, knowing so much thrives without flowers, struggling against the steep, before the great rift where strangers still crave heat. There are fewer winters ahead than behind now—even less of us after dark. It's the earth that tilts away from the sun, you say—as you turn your face from me. (But, I still want that axe of warmth that steadies me—even when I’m happy.) How a god with festivities in mind might come searching for me on my thin boat of ice. I guess the openness is what I really need. Lungs heavy with eucalyptus, a prodigal return. How far we could go together guided by a victory of geese, flying towards the sheen you call home. This ascent is what women were made for. A place to lose our footing, end on all fours— an em dash of deer, a monologue of beasts, before clouds desert us as salt-licked— the stranded eventually sliding back to meet us. This day like tomorrow—a mouth closing, both theatre and ordinary.
Love poem for a patient in waiting —After T.S. Eliot It won’t hurt if you lie, palms together. Etherised means to become ether. What then? Angels tend your ex-valley where nothing thrives, thus nothing injures. It’s safe this side of the bed; Canada geese braid yellow-fog into meaning & surgeons claim that’s the spirit-veil lifting while flesh drowns in surgical spring. Here, I consult someone compelling who refers me to the waves, though I miss the tropics of skin, it’s possible to go under cross thresholds still fantasise a willow’s green fountain, a wrist watershed with dusk. To be chiaroscuro & still return blue-guilty with flowers —a safe distance from the ambush. Vikki C.
Vikki C. holding a copy of In the Blueprint of Her Iris (2nd edition - 2026), published by Ice Floe Press.
For now, we’re distracted, painting landscapes, clothless. River rushes aglow, stroking the violet sky. Point to it all in secret memoir — the infidel’s soundtrack. Vikki C. "The Other Affair" Sweet Lit Volume 17
Cover of ‘Shored Fragments: Poems in Response to Eliot’s The Waste Land', published by Black Bough Poetry.
Image for upcoming launch of Skylight 47, Issue 21 showing the cover of Issue 21 plus details of launch date, venue and special guest David Nash who will launch the issue and read at the event along with issue contributors.
MANIFEST — after Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Why fetishize a far elsewhere? Already you transport our fractures wherever you exist. Postmemory, slow-pan the scarlet interior. Stations oneiric, each Jungian guest graded & bled, braced for the next impermanence. Where every faux-garden subverts the path to idyll. Abandoned teacups divining in summer-rain eventually flood with caveat. Prodigal son the father you’re losing recollects as drops of a sentient away. Vikki C.
'Water Babies' - an original piano piece written for World Piano Day a few years ago. Never shared here before. Also an excuse to dwell in this beautiful ocean again. A refuge from all the dis-order. 🎹 I hope it takes you where you need to be ❤️ #poetrycommunity #piano #ocean #blackandwhitefilm
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as they were In Aether, point to any beauty—it has surely left. Before theory, photons began their far-dance towards who we became. Now, at last, we witness past luminaries. The once Great Equatorial Telescope, surveying for soft proof. Delays inevitable for a glimpse of good. Minefields in Croatia glaze with marigolds —one for every future [tragedy]. Pre-extinct wings rewild our rifts. The ex-you—less cataract—more civil twilight & though speech is improbable, something bonds our miming-hands. In milk-stained gowns, each graduate still an infant —diminishing. Vikki C.
Postmemory (2026) by Vikki C. #horse #yearofthehorse #lament #artistcommunity #photography #poetrycommunity
Finding You In a Late Field & Other Small Mercies When soft and stampede appear in the same sentence, there’s expectation of loss. Of what could flourish. We claim it is dappled, even without seeing the hooves. We want to name the creature — the cause of dust rising. In a week, maybe prayer or a sense of singing, but today, we plant ourselves whole in heavy turf. I could point to the glades where they happily grazed. Blame the startled mare, or the incidental shotgun. And the foals, looking up only to taste the rain as it arrives without a siren. No apparent casualties. But how we obsess to save the foal, two eyes peering through a shower of slow bullets. Because each droplet means more when in love. The rivers shiver their way through a dry spell. A field effervesces as if finding us in its fragrance, lightning golds the sharp V of migratory geese. We are looking up too, at where language failed. Our tongues outstretched to this rare syrup. The season says: strip off your layers. Lie down, let the deep cold run its course. Soon, the wordless music of snow, empty of my footfalls. The blankest score of pale meadow-frost. Fog, breath, sheer manes — streaming a ritual blurring towards the next joy. Some small mercy unplugging the sun, so we can hide a little longer, inside this great game,
Portrait Of The Heart In Love, At World’s End I will wake alone, closer to crimson water than land. It's hard to fit in with meaning when we are split, along breastbone like that herring at the wet market where Mother shopped — saving money to travel elsewhere with him in mind. A dying fish glittering the grey, that gentle disturbance worth a human vessel, sinking into itself. She’d rather trudge through swarms of loud, foreign bodies at the edge of survival just to claim the first batch of clams for chowder he loved. The steam from the bread bowl easily confused with his breath, ghosting the harbour. There’s an early light. A blessing before the engines sound. The pier where we last met, extends into the vital artery I cannot reach. You say blue must mean sky. Must be what haloes the living. But there’s a different hue around those who pass us by. It bruises the horizon while the world consumes its own mortal tissue. There’s a chamber at the core of what isn’t. Not silence, but its artefact. Everything is a quarter pace. Disease spreads slower but its cure needs another century to be discovered. Is it philosophy or loneliness that brings us rushing back here, transfused? It’s the oldest dilemma. Trespassing a holy enclosure to pick the reddest clots of peonies for you. Being the organ you desperately need donated — but the wrong blood type. The molten pulse softening to broth — the fish flung back into its own wild heaven.
"End Pleasures" by Vikki C. in The Cove, 'Footnotes' issue.
Artwork for 'Primavera' by Robert Frede Kenter
There’s the idea of prayer and the idea of us Between winter and spring you ask too much of me. Yes, there’s midterm resentment, even in rare dreams— a knife in the violets, rain falling in buckets you say don’t count. Except when the news is dire. Then we looked to the votes for a radical bloom. I've still no proof of the path. Past dusk, every window frames a surrogate faith. An invisible violence, the wrong stag hitting the headlights dragged across a blank threshold, where all I do is recover from one more sentence. Meaning the arms encircle a girl risen from green, but the palms meet only a lapse of ochre —the seismic other signaling past silos. A disciple that follows what I might look like whole. Gold gusts turning from the swinging door, fooling the flocks towards freedom. How we loved in opposites, like one of these might lead to home.
'Awayness' by Vikki C. (2026)
Vikki C.
Ritual for Returning Girl, make provisions for descent. Wear dusklight (whatever shade), haloed above your scalp. Days they are fooled — happy for your arrival. Forest lattice, a signage for those avoiding exhaust. Stoop to the ambush of wild mint along the ex-roads. Secret its scent & recite her soup & sonnets. Before Woman. Before the slow-dive of pines, the slick pebbles of herds we could not keep. Sweeten to the miniatures of the dark hills. Remove my shoes in the weep-green lake. A guest eyeing cake, rising from blonde deserts. Lucky stranger — so welcome everywhere. Nightly, a butterfly stalks my collarbone, believing it is home. Vikki C.
P.S. I PRACTISED THE ÉTUDE TODAY Today, the feature wall bears a different motif, the way light refracts against Mother's vintage chinaware casting apologies back to a sender — for absence. By evening, I’ve only practised the etúde once, my execution poor, like that exam with an unexpected Distinction, the day she waited two hours at Kensington. Outside, snow drifts accentuating the chords I always found hard to reach. Self-study is not my discipline—except when she stirs soup counter-clockwise, time miraculously slowing above the frozen lake, two swans briefly coming into focus. Today, I cooked the last tomatoes from her garden and shook out the sheets in autumn mist. This is a woman's sorrow no man can carry, save for replying sparsely on paper: Dear stranger, from here, the poplars mother me like votive candles —their wicks steadily lit, one-by-one under a rose-gold dusk. When doves coo in the atrium, my faith returns soft-winged and sudden. They linger, peck at the fallen grain — long enough for me to sign off as someone you'd bring home. Two bodies hungry for quiet miracles. She would have loved your paintings, your books—your comfortable silence —like a long refrain, whenever we were too far away to hear the music.
Morningfall I wake, anxious for first milk, the logistics of things I cannot keep. For you on another timescale, halving passion in unequal twos. Spitting its black-eyed seeds in the drain, instead of back to jewelled earth. I worry how you've not written first. How the world eats at our private amber. We’re conditioned to suffer widely, to help the on-screen casualties, but cannot handle the small griefs. Interior winds burying our heads deep into the valley’s neck. I am afraid of turning away from hyacinth and hope. From all that spoils without attention. I cannot come nearer than the fox to the lilac bed, hungry but aware of the latest rage. I’m afraid of straying while men break bread, scheming big wars. Fear easy extinction, like those I hold—whom I’ve never told I am holding. On the river that silvers through, none notice the salmon rush towards joy. My copper-clay coat, warm with potential. Yet sorrow has my tail and snow buries the shortest path to you. Honey hardens in airtight jars. The sweet life, still unreachable as ice freezes the limbs, the tongue. Hear the fridge's dull anthem hum. Its nightly glow on my salty cheek. What preserves longer than God intends? You have not let me go and I fear this extended light will start a new devotion.
'The Problem of the Lantern' from After Image by Jenny George.
Grace Periodic No one comes with outstretched hands. So I store up more soft wisdom, kernels sticky with amnesia. Who will remember this burial by next fall? I’ve wandered remotely from the magnolia, and now we’re over. Gathered oats and half-truths that fit loosely into some other life. Roofs mistaken for shelter and windows for privacy. There are things I let slip downstream, pretending they don’t belong. Cedar ash. A deer’s beige muteness. Dripping aspens—a glamour I thought I didn’t need. When the current takes, I resume my piety, as you place me back between velvet heads that burgeon to explode. A red fragrance ensnares, the harsh elements shuffling to forget. Through rain-screens, migratory birds circle like fighter jets. When the lead bird divebombs, a cloud frissons over the peach trees as if nectar were enough for those who avoid common speech. They perch on black lines. Leaning in like figures in burgundy caves. The space between lips, diminished by night-ink. Many ask what I’ve achieved in becoming? So I raise the air where my arms were and wait for ice to lacquer the lake. I lean in to look, and though I’m unable to tell, I kiss what I see—sometimes gently—before losing this virtue. In the study of evolution, I leave the stray light and easy blues for the unborn. They know to bless what I abandon. For this, I have practised all my life.