Vikki C.

@vikkicwrites

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

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Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· 19d

Honoured to receive an acceptance from @42milespress.bsky.social for my poem "California, Baby" which will be published in Issue 5 of The Glacier – a journal I've long admired for its exquisite work on the eco-human. My thanks to EIC David Dodd Lee & Managing Editor @jotyleon.bsky.social 🙏

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· 21d

Delighted my poem"Landscape and Portrait with Pomegranates" will be published in @acropolisjournal.bsky.social's Catamenia Collective Project. It'll be my 4th outing with Acropolis — home to work with a dark, mythic bent. Ty to EIC @louisemather.bsky.social & Guest ed. @meanerharker.bsky.social 🤍

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· 21d

Hello Hong Kong. It's been a minute.. 🇭🇰 🖤✈️ #travel #summer #diary #poetrycommunity #artistcommunity

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· 23d

How do you write where you've never been? Could that liminality between life and death be a place? 'Aubade for Antarctica' is an elegy but also an ode to transformation. Thank you to Elsewhere: A Journal of Place for publishing it in their The End of the World issue 🤍 Link to all 3 poems below.

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.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· 23d

Honoured to have 3 poems out in The End of the World issue of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place 🤍 You can read 'Our Silent Nature', 'Aubade for Antarctica' and 'Refuge' here. www.elsewhere-journal.com/the-end-of-the-world/2026/7/1/three-poems-2 My thanks to editors Anna Evans and Marcel Krueger.

Cover art by Manish C. Pathak for Elsewhere: A Journal of Place 'The End of the World'.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· 24d

This poem captures the Sunday spirit so beautifully 🤍 'From within my bodily singularity' By Julia Fiedorczuk Translated By Bill Johnston via The Poetry Foundation. #poetrycommunity #poetry

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.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· Jul 13

Honoured to have a new poem 'Self-Portrait of a Grief Bypass' in Equatorial Magazine Issue 9 alongside stellar poets. A stunner of an issue. Thank you to Editor Benjamin Faro for giving my work such a beautiful home ❤️ Check out the full issue: www.equatorialmag.com/issue-nine #poetrycommunity

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.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· Jul 8

Warmest thanks to Paul Brookes @thewombwellrainbow.bsky.social for featuring 3 new poems of mine in The Starbeck Orion Summer Feast. Honoured to be invited to contribute to this beautiful fifty day poetry and art showcase ✨️ Here is one of the poems - 'The Thing About Flowers'. #poetrycommunity

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?

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· Jul 4

Once (2026) #bwphotography #photography #writingcommunity #artistcommunity @photohour.bsky.social

Once (2026) - part of a bw photo series by Vikki C.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· Jul 1

Summer on the road, again 🖤 #photobw #photography #artistcommunity #poetrydiary #poetrycommunity

Black and white photo collage entitled 'Summer on the road, again' by Vikki C. A meditation on time, memory and place.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· Jun 29

This beauty 'Postdiluvian' by Emma Bolden @emmabolden.bsky.social in @versedaily.bsky.social — originally published in Asheville Poetry Review ❤️ #poetrycommunity #WritingCommunity

'Postdiluvian' by Emma Bolden in Verse Daily — originally published in Asheville Poetry Review.

#poetrycommunity #WritingCommunity

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· Jun 28

"If the most sidereal drink is pain, the most soothing clock is music. A poetry of shine could come of this." 'Morning Star' by C. D. Wright - via Academy of American Poets 🤍 poets.org/poem/morning... #poetry #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.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· Jun 24

Summer days with In the Blueprint of Her Iris - 2nd edition ✨️ A hybrid collaboration of poems by Vikki C. and striking artwork by @rfredekenter.bsky.social 🔥 Read about our process and the inspiration behind the book & order your copy! @icefloepress.bsky.social icefloepress.net/in-the-bluep...

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.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· Jun 20

Summer days here.. and the latest project 🤍 #poetrycommunity #sojourn #artistcommunity #WIP #blossom

White blossom tree on a wooden terrace with green metal chairs and railing. Some of the petals have fallen.

Statue of a winged cherub in a garden with a few red roses and a yellow flower around it.

Tablet and handwritten draft in a notebook with pen and iced latte.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· Jun 19

Honoured and delighted to have three poems accepted by Elsewhere: A Journal of Place for their 'The End of the World' issue. Thank you to editors Anna Evans and Marcel Krueger for selecting 'Our Silent Nature', 'Aubade for Antarctica' and 'Refuge'. 🙏💙 www.elsewhere-journal.com/about

Banner of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place plus a testimonial by Robert Macfarlane as seen on the journal's About page.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· Jun 17

Favourite poems on the body, or related to the body? Love this one: 'Respiration' by Jamaal May ❤️ (via Poetry Foundation) www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi... #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity

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)

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· Jun 12

"For Love, We Attempt Another Ars Poetica" by Vikki C. alongside beautiful image by @rfredekenter.bsky.social ✨️ From our collaboration IN THE BLUEPRINT OF HER IRIS - 2nd edition (@icefloepress.bsky.social) 💙 Available at Ice Floe: icefloepress.net/in-the-bluep... Thank you for your support 🙏💐

Artwork by Robert Frede Kenter that accompanies "For Love, We Attempt Another Ars Poetica".

FOR LOVE, WE ATTEMPT ANOTHER ARS POETICA

Vikki C.

To choose to live in this world,
blue or otherwise. That is what I tell the poet who tries

so hard to write the best opening. To creep naked into winter
without a word of evolution. For now, my new meds

save you the trouble of visiting—meaning
estrangement is a spare room not worth its view.

All year, waves break against alien rocks, wrong and spectacular.
And our secret isn’t how we left it, smothered with flowers,

but figuratively it’s there—as we are—asking:
How can the poem thrive without my anxiety?

Evening piles its tricks over my body, daring me
to leave you again. Spoon-feeding me to its damp glitter,

where abeyance is a far suspension bridge. I think of that mother
who couldn’t bear to stay on Earth, when Earth was still home.

How her orphaned daughter grew up not-a-poet—choosing a different
art altogether—painting a dead bird’s wings to obsession.

Flames of white feathers. Feathers of white flames. No matter the myth,
the irony after rising—is the fear of heights. Where questions on the

mechanics of breath happen to be mine. Will the rope soften too?
How much sky is true and available?

How will I lower myself, without missing you?

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· Jun 10

Honoured that my poem "Peacemaker" has been selected for 'In Every Generation, An Anthology', to be published by @unsolicitedpress.bsky.social – exploring how peace is inherited through families, communities, and collective memory. Gratitude to editors Leonora Simonovis and Amy Shimshon Santo 💙

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· Jun 6

Taking a break from poetry today for some piano. Have a good weekend. Hope you like it 🤍🌿 🎧 Listen to Reverie in G by Vikki C. Music on #SoundCloud on.soundcloud.com/SABmfd9ysN5n...

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· Jun 2

A new poem shared for #TTT, lightly inspired by Elizabeth Bishop's 'At the Fishhouses' which I love for its attentiveness to natural beauty and details of place. Here is 'June, waves sharp at my ankles'. Thank you @matthewmcsmith.bsky.social and @blackboughpoetry.bsky.social #poetrycommunity

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.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· May 31

"The mind is a thing deeply marked. I have bound myself to this damage." This beauty by Laurie Sheck '[Did not forsee]', from a favourite collection CAPTIVITY 🤍 #smallpoemsunday @tomsnarsky.bsky.social #poetrycommunity

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.@vikkicwrites· May 30

Poet at work. Finally handed in one assignment...now, onto the next. Plus those pretty signs of summer to keep her company 🤍 #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #artistcommunity #summer #handswritten

Bw image of notebook with handwriting, pen, flat white and a laptop.

Pink flowers and foliage against a shadowed pavement.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· May 26

A new piece written for #TTT after Wallace Stevens' works, admired for his examination of poetics, world themes infused with a subtle political tension and elegant natural imagery. 'For each absence, I gave it a voice' Thank you @matthewmcsmith.bsky.social and @blackboughpoetry.bsky.social

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.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· May 23

Honoured to have a new poem in Scrivener Creative Review @scrivener1980.bsky.social, the literary journal of McGill University, Montreal❤️ TY to EICs Izzi Holmes & Jacob Sponga for giving 'When I say legacy' such a wonderful home alongside writers from Montreal & beyond. A truly international mix 🇨🇦🌍

When I say legacy
Vikki C.

I mean the plateau beyond bullet range. Nocturnes replacing the mundane hallway. No hierarchy where geniuses are shunned for peaking early. No grief with its deadwood snare. I came to know love—just there. In the pantheon, where ladders are for handymen and snakes. The slow-spun yearning for a stranglehold. A pressure taken off the heart and belly. I wanted the whole entrapment. To hang on a thread, easily severed by a passerby. To seem accidental. The milkweed expiring in the refrigerator, as we unpack another will. There are too many ways to leave outside a door. The sodden field shorn of its girlhood. This is how we knew, something was lost, behind the ruin. No way to avoid the chariot on the oily homestretch. The bird’s limp body, cherry-blazed at dusk. That is nature, you say. Just not the human kind. The odds none would believe. How ancient rooms begin in the open, before becoming a dirty secret. We hand down what we can’t keep: a four-poster bed, a sheet soaked in pearly elixir. The mouth’s potential. The inventory tagged with roselight. But only once. Only when snow is really snow. Enough to want the clean life back.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· May 22

My contributor copy of Skylight 47, Issue 21 arrived all the way from Ireland! 🍀 A beauty! Amazing writing from Ireland & across the globe plus stunning art by Bradley Gray. Delighted to see my poem 'Aubade for a Blue Country'💙 Thank you to editors Bernie Crawford, Ruth Quinlan and D’or Seifer 💐

Skylight 47, Issue 21, plus 2 poetry postcards featuring same cover design.

Vikki C.

Aubade for a Blue Country

Again, I roll over. Feel it before naming it.
Like all questions that touch us too early,

in closeness, something else drifts away.
These are the rules we break, just to hold

the exception, which is sometimes gold
—a jewel inside the burnt vessel.

Aren’t mornings sacrifice enough?
Wet pillows of light that make me turn

and reach—past the you I once knew.
The thing that changed before I did.

A sheet of silk, or just language
pulled taut over my head to hide

who I am. I see a little less,
but am held with two warm hands.

I breathe through its fibres, fall into
the lofty place, wind just after rain

threading wild stems of cotton.
Generations on, there is barely

a god between that field and mine.
Only names handed down by trade,

the steps of a mother landing
where the sun splits at my feet.

I wonder how the path makes itself known,
collars of fog teasing would-be lilacs.

At intervals, our identity papers
make a home, gently blown to pieces.

Like that’s legal where I’m going.
It must be real—the boat, the tug behind the ribs.

Butterflies trapped in the architecture
—a gesture of salt left behind.

The wave that makes me miss
all the blue I've never seen.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· May 19

For #TopTweetTuesday, a poem after Saskia Hamilton's 'All Souls' — also subtly exploring prompt themes: party, touch, longing and subterranean. MORNING PASSAGES Thank you @matthewmcsmith.bsky.social and @blackboughpoetry.bsky.social for the lovely inspiration 🤍 #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity

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.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· May 15

Honoured to have a triptych of poems 'Towards Her' plus an artist statement up at @thewingedmoon.bsky.social 🌙 My warmest thanks to Jai Michelle for inviting me to contribute to the creative dialogue at the magazine. thewingedmoon.substack.com/p/towards-her Here is 'Solstice, Santorini caldera'

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.

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· May 12

"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" A piece inspired by 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' – plus other surreal experiences. 'Love poem for a patient in waiting' 🖤 #poetrycommunity

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.@vikkicwrites· May 10

Things she still loves: flowers, Chopin, late light against a dark polished piano, coffee and interior monologues 🖤 #mothersday #sunday #tyforthemusic #boho #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity

Vikki C.@vikkicwrites· May 9

Beautiful start to the weekend - *2nd edition of In the Blueprint of Her Iris arrived! Ty @rfredekenter.bsky.social for bringing this expanded volume into the world🔥 Poems by Vikki C. & stunning art by Robert Frede Kenter. Order yours at @icefloepress.bsky.social 🩵 icefloepress.net/in-the-bluep...