Three poems

By Vikki C.

Our Silent Nature

The last autumn of touch was given mutely,

burnished notes dripping their damp vowels.

We were forbidden from bringing the outside in.

No more taking of quail eggs when the chickens

refused our demands. No collecting rare butterflies

for them to evaporate against stained glass.

You can’t save the wild to save yourself now, said mother

from a grassy register beneath our feet.

The minute you touch what isn’t yours, you’re the enemy

of so many you don’t even know. By the time you try

to protect them, the Atlantic will have consumed

you whole. Its silky jaws of salt-light closing in on

our bedlam, drowning bedclothes, filling the empty

vessels in our lives. A relief—maybe even the opposite

of war, but not all crystal calm. I heard it’s the resistance

of science or just an idyll at the centre of a flood.

Mostly it was the whale ribs around a collapsed lung,

or any place I reeled myself in with haste. Once,

floating in a giant plastic boat with clueless others,

meant a soft incubator of unknowing—the best love

at that time. Then, it was a hard glacier to practise

jaywalking like stray children we never knew.

Ones who kept their names tucked under their tongues

like rescue rafts. Still we wanted labels: the glacier,

maybe Greenland or Iceland. A loose harness of

consonants the world was trained to ignore.

Sometimes it was the distance itself, or a cold lantern

trapped near the pole, before being snuffed out.

See me at the edge of our haven, scooping rotten mangoes,

the way a heart is eaten with delicacy and violence

when no one else is here at home, watching grief’s

tentative weather. None notice an emergency flare

spearing the breasts of migratory geese. All you see

—if you look up at all—is their snow-lapsed wings.

A luminosity licked clean of earthly filth. The thing

you wanted to be true—held brief above an inventory of trees.

 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.

Refuge

To you who emptied my future homes.

Stole our grain and girlhoods.

Whose choice is life anymore?

I found a wounded fox in frozen hawthorn

at the border where the land’s lip meets

the powder of chance. It had my father’s eyes.

The past looking past, marbled and wondering

— to be left wedged between slabs of ice,

or rescued, swept off into captivity,

raised by children from the other side?

Dear enemy, I am not sure how different

we are, or will be, inside our bent cages.

All the good songs seem to come from outside

where colours rain animal and flower equally.

I listen and soon forget why we fight. Maybe

you were plain mischief, and I was sour game.

Wish you’d write back, as if loved.

As if I were the cause of the feral wound.

I’d carry all the injured on my shoulder.

Free them into the damp-green pasture.

Watch them mend, mate and nurture.

And when they’re finally strong,

I’ll come home too, as a woman who takes

her rivals dancing in the storm. Watches

their skin, hair and uniform glissando.

I’ll make a real waste of death.

I’ll bring their wind-salted bodies in

— until I meet my father again.

Vikki C. is a London-born poet and essayist whose writing explores heritage, ecology, myth and the posthuman world. Her work appears internationally in venues such as EcoTheo Review, Grain, The Inflectionist Review, Heavy Feather Review, The Ilanot Review, TIMBER, Psaltery & Lyre, Action, Spectacle, Scrivener Creative Review, ONE ART, The Blue Mountain Review, Ice Floe Press, Skylight 47, Black Bough Poetry, Pinhole Poetry and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Forward Prize, Best of the Net and the Orison Best Spiritual Literature award and she was shortlisted in The Bridport Prize 2025. In The Blueprint of Her Iris (Ice Floe Press, 2025), a hybrid collaboration, is her third collection. She has served as a contributing editor at The Winged Moon Magazine and guest edited the Ice Floe Press 2026 hybrid series ‘Process/Marginalia/Otherworlds’. Linktree: linktr.ee/vikki_c._author