How We Save Others Whilst Dying
by Vikki C.
I watch you filling a crystal decanter with amber
and only hope to leave with the simplest kinds of sorrow:
The one which rides every train south, past the cemetery,
the lakes out east oiled with an exquisite colour spectrum,
or the frost on violets in the valley you cannot cross.
It is like seeing the deer passing through a white field
that was not there before us. Or claiming a miracle.
Men travel away to grow into boys with a thirst for beauty.
Women stay put, waiting for lost boys to return.
Like a placeholder for faith or something immeasurable.
Like the sting of pine air near the station where you vanished.
Where we keep falling in love through wet carriage windows
— the yellow flax beyond, giving flame to a coldness we could not hold.
When I die, I hope to be surrounded by books of poets I’ve never met.
The doors to this end left ajar as life seeks me out again—
silk butterflies whirring above my face with caution.
Because I have not drunk in ninety days, this makes it a wilderness
with no bread or warm body to sleep with. The snow is cold aspirin for survivors.
I drink it with all its traces—of blood, salt and humility.
So that in the musk of my last hour, the bees will hover above my open mouth,
motioning of honey—without entering the place where the war began.
Vikki C. is a British-born, award nominated writer, poet and musician. She is the author of The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press) and the full-length collection Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press). Vikki’s poetry and stories appear or are forthcoming in venues such as EcoTheo Review, ONE ART Poetry, The Belfast Review, Psaltery & Lyre, Dust Poetry Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, Nightingale & Sparrow, Ice Floe Press, Acropolis Journal, DarkWinter Literary Magazine, Across The Margin, The Broken Spine, Boats Against The Current, Fevers of The Mind, Jerry Jazz Musician, Origami Poems, Mythic Picnic, Loft Books, Salo Press, Igneus Press, Lazuli Literary Group, The Write-In (National Flash Fiction Day) and various other places. Vikki is on Twitter @VWC_Writes.