iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

"I was made in the image of a thing without an image & silence, too, is your invention." This stunning and poignant poem 'Portrait of My Gender as [Inaudible]' by Meg Day 🤍 via Poetry Foundation www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi... #poetrycommunity #poetry

Portrait of My Gender as [Inaudible]

By Meg Day

I knew I was a god
when you could not
agree on my name

& still, none you spoke
could force me to listen
closer. Is this the nothing

the antelope felt when
Adam, lit on his own
entitling, dubbed family,

genus, species? So many
descendants became
doctors, delivered

babies, bestowed bodies
names as if to say it is to make it
so. Can it be a comfort between

us, the fact of my creation?
I was made in the image
of a thing without

an image & silence, too,
is your invention. Who prays
for a god except to appear

with answers, but never
a body? A voice? If I told you
you wouldn’t believe me

because I was the one
to say it. On the first day
there was no sound

worth mentioning. If I, too,
am a conductor of air, the only
praise I know is in stereo 

(one pair—an open hand & closed
fist—will have to do). I made
a photograph of my name:

there was a shadow in a field
& I put my shadow in it. You
can’t hear me, but I’m there.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Delighted to have a new poem "On Culture: An Assay" in Poetry Online's October 2026 issue — and in wonderfully talented company too! 🤍 🍂 My thanks to editor Tarik Dobbs for giving this piece such a beautiful home 🙏 Read and listen to me read the full piece here: poetry.onl/read/vikki-c

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Celebrating the 1st book birthday of @saraswatinagpal.bsky.social's Drench Me in Silver published by @blackboughpoetry.bsky.social 💜 Here's a favourite poem 'Chai' which explores the nuance and tensions between culinary rituals and domestic and cultural dynamics. A stunning collection all round!

A photo of Drench Me in Silver by Saraswati Nagpal, published by Black Bough Poetry.

'Chai' from Drench Me in Silver by Saraswati Nagpal, published by Black Bough Poetry.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Honoured and grateful to receive an acceptance from UK based @stoatpoetry.bsky.social today. Thank you to editor Ingrid Leonard for selecting my poems 'Reverse migration' and 'Acropolis as body, as language' for Issue 2 of the magazine 🤍 #poetrycommunity

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

A reading of my poem "Queerness of Our Species", published in @rowanglassworks.bsky.social Issue 33 yesterday. This video appears in their "Looking Glass" section for the issue alongside meta-discursive insights on the poem. Check out the full issue & features: rowanglassworks.org/fall-2026.html

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Link to full issue plus "Looking Glass" feature and video reading 🍁 www.rowanglassworks.org/fall-2026.html

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Delighted to have a new poem "Queerness of Our Species" in @rowanglassworks.bsky.social Issue 33! Also a special "Looking Glass" feature with meta-discursive insights about my poem plus a video reading 🔥 Thank you to EIC Katie Budris for including me in this gorgeous issue! Link below 🤍 #poetry

Queerness of Our Species

Vikki C.

Male penguins raise three young, said the headline.
The two had chased the female off, right after she’d laid eggs.
By dusk, the couple had planned the whole family.

Another cruelty to convention. Another soft survival.

It isn’t for us to know if the mother is still alive,
so the story pickaxes at unknowns,
becoming thinner as days glow and contract.

The moment we chose each other, the soft down
between us began to molt, leaving the bare cage of our hands,
the bony lamps of our shoulder blades.

There’s no word for such quickening anymore.

My own weather froze the feather I witnessed on my
way out to Portobello—but never enough to fix it
to the icy ledge. The same ledge I was known

to lean out from—man-watching with a bear’s hunger.

The tiny plume lifted sharp on a white wind,
sailing off to the place where the tender ring.
Later, I read that the mother penguin was found,

circling her young—but now thinks them all corrupt.

The two males clean out of sight—still famed
for their strange deed. It’s unclear who abandoned whom,
only that things circled, our feet slipping beneath dun grass

—till we raised each other again, out of more-than-human nature.

That Sunday, armed with market flowers and brown paper bags,
I brought back your favourite fish for supper—though
you were unlikely to attend. I hoped we’d dine together again.

Late light flooding the kitchen. Scent of herbs and fatigue,

the fish glittering on the large wooden board.
Its one marble eye turning from clear to cloudy
—a small heaven, keenly looking out for your return.

That Sunday, armed with market flowers and brown paper bags,
I brought back your favourite fish for supper—though
you were unlikely to attend. I hoped we’d dine together again.

Late light flooding the kitchen. Scent of herbs and fatigue,

the fish glittering on the large wooden board.
Its one marble eye turning from clear to cloudy
—a small heaven, keenly looking out for your return.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

'To the earth's edge, where difference ends' From The Maybe-Bird (The Song Cave) by Jennifer Elise Foerster 🤍 #poetry #poetrycommunity

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Honoured my poem "Survivorship" has been nominated by The Ilanot Review for the @sundresspub.bsky.social 2027 Best of the Net Anthology🔥 My thanks to Managing Editor Marcela Sulak and the team at The Ilanot Review. What a lovely gift! Congratulations and best of luck to all the nominees! #BoTN

The Ilanot Review 2027 Best of the Net Anthology nominations.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Loving this excerpt from Audacity of Form. The voice liberating, most alive in the *spaces between nature, music, art & kinship. @rfredekenter.bsky.social — another "poet among painters", if I may say so. No surprise given the lifelong circle of artists/collaborators. @icefloepress.bsky.social ✨️

'Lines I Found For You' - an excerpt from Audacity of Form by Robert Frede Kenter.

Cover of Audacity of Form by Robert Frede Kenter.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Weekends are always special when new books arrive. Today, it’s these three beauties from The Song Cave @thesongcave.bsky.social ❤️ 📚 • The Maybe-Bird, Jennifer Elise Foerster • Shake Until Cloudy, Amanda Nadelberg • Earthly, Jean Follain – translated by Andrew Seguin #poetrybooks

Three books from The Song Cave @thesongcave.sky.social:

• The Maybe-Bird, Jennifer Elise Foerster
• Shake Until Cloudy, Amanda Nadelberg
• Earthly, Jean Follain – translated by Andrew Seguin

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

On the theme of coast/ longing/ contemplation here is a new poem: 'Coastal autobiography' Thank you as always @matthewmcsmith.bsky.social and @blackboughpoetry.bsky.social 🤍 #poetrycommunity #poetry #writingcommunity

Coastal autobiography

I rest in my receding, high-winds pulling each tide
like a hair, glossy and remembered,
feet sinking in rough constellations;
the crayfish’s broken armour
eclipsed by washed-up jellyfish
translucent, pulsing still.

*
As if a knot of nerves is enough
to simplify the loss.
Again, a blue boat wrestles
our wrong weathers.
What will they throw overboard to save themselves?
The cries of birds burn red.

*
Dusk deep inside each clear body,
blood believable. I must not touch.
Even in death, sting still potent,
one hallucinates a side-effect,
salty men backstroking through fog,
a pearlwashed rhythm
I enter to endure.

Vikki C.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

"Certain events of love drew my body nearer to meaning." This beautiful poem 'The Anxiety of Meaning' by Bianca Stone in The Glacier 🤍 @42milespress.bsky.social theglacierjournal.com/issue-three/... #poetrycommunity #poetry

The Anxiety of Meaning

Bianca Stone

Certain events of love
drew my body nearer to meaning.

All poets are liars.
Wrecked against meaning. Starved
on the beach of meaning—

I want to keep your head in a black bag, I said.

Who can distinguish the remembered
from the desired? I know a little
the agony of it. I drew nearer still.

What do I know about getting?
I know my mother turned away.
That I slipped from her body again and again,
tied down in an incubator and punctured
with a life-saving light.

I know that all that time
an ancient poem
was writing itself in the
hallway, where a mask hung on the wall
looking without seeing.

I know I turned away. Can you feel it?
How the head longs to rid the face
of a certain danceless dance. That we were

condemned to dualism at birth.
Dualism is dead.
And long live dualism.

That certain events of love
drew us nearer to mean.
That the heart is chilled
by a tormented wave

that thinks it is not the sea.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

In her world, handwritten draft essays are a thing.... Prepping for an upcoming feature 🤍 #writingcommunity #writerslife #oldschool

Excerpt of a handwritten draft essay in a notebook. A ballpoint pen rests in the central fold of the notebook.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Honoured to lead off @icefloepress.bsky.social's ‘Dis/enchantment/ Anomie /Spectacle’ series with a collaboration FROST Poem & art by @rfredekenter.bsky.social Spoken word, music & production by Vikki C. A joy to create a soundscape for this startling piece 🔥 icefloepress.net/2026/09/03/f...

Collage of new Ice Floe collaboration FROST by Vikki C. and Robert Frede Kenter. The collage shows the webpage of the published work alongside photos of both creators.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

28/8: "And the green afternoons where the shutter does no justice..." #poetrycommunity #artistcommunity #photography #writingcommunityً #highlandretreat #WIP

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

This beautiful poem on the body and selfhood... 'Beyond Love' by Emma Bolden @emmabolden.bsky.social 🤍 Via poets.org poets.org/poem/beyond-... (Alt text included in image) #PoetryCommunity #poetry

Beyond Love

Emma Bolden

If the saints are to be believed, if this body is a dress
we slip into, out of, if each day and night is the mantle
we tie around our shoulders, fabric thin as the time it takes
teeth to flatten the end of a thread and lead it through

an eyed needle, then what am I to make of the gorgeous
terror every star makes out of its own distance? Sometimes
I can see the body as a blaze, bright-gloried, flamed
and holy as a pin-prick the size of a soul. And if the soul

is a blaze to be believed, then belief blazes a highway
to some beyond, a beauty that begins with every ordinary
sweetness, every one small but still indefinable love.
Every morning, when I wash the wrongs I’ve made right

out of my hair, I want to believe in each drop of water
as a promise of and from the all that we’re meant to contain.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

"Year’s end, now. A theory of edges. A vow to complete certain tasks—they will not improve me, but dissipate, burn off like vapor." Beautiful poem 'The Bridge' By Elisa Gabbert 🤍 Via Academy of American Poets. #poetry #poetrycommunity

The Bridge

Elisa Gabbert

Once there was a bridge I couldn’t cross.
Cusp of summer. Sound of insects
carried with me, from Melville’s fields
in my-heart-on-the-bridge, their zzzz.

Year’s end, now. A theory of edges. A vow
to complete certain tasks—they will not
improve me, but dissipate, burn off
like vapor. I’ve already been too good.

I thought keys would fly out of my pocket
and then I would have to fly after,
to enter the terrifying room
where things blow away to.

Scraps of lists, a paper flower,
the raspberry clouds of the day’s
attenuation. A series of signs said
help was there, but not for me.

Copyright © 2025 by Elisa Gabbert.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

"To be both ignored and abraded by a coarse sky. I did not offer up parts of me like kindling. I will not embellish a single hemisphere." This beauty 'My Hair Burned Like Berenice' by Ruth Awad 🤍 Via @poetry.foundation #poetrycommunity #poetry

My Hair Burned Like Berenice

By Ruth Awad

And after nailed upon the night
Berenice’s burning hair.
—W.B. Yeats, “Her Dream”

Days of rain. The drey outside my window would keel
and the wind would plunder. My heart was valent
with possibility: I could be anyone now, half woman,
half asterism. Fragmental as a new year. Patron saint
of the rutilant and cindering. I could rove incognito
to places pinned in office calendars. Too long I’d
mothered myself with the admiration of onlookers.
I was grateful to be alone in my abstraction. To be both
ignored and abraded by a coarse sky. I did not offer up
parts of me like kindling. I will not embellish a single
hemisphere. The ground bulges with a wet sound.
It is glutted with what was given. I do the wolfish work
of god and make myself again. Ripen like lichen on
the pavement. Like rain carrying the memory of lightning.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

"Map of terror and pleasure, ardent junk, passionate congress filled with the arguments of chemicals" This gorgeous poem on the body. Just wow 🤍 'Body' By Alissa Leigh (Alissa Valles) Via @poetry.foundation www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazi... #poetrycommunity #poetry #body

Body

By Alissa Leigh (Alissa Valles)

Map of terror and pleasure,
ardent junk, passionate congress
filled with the arguments of chemicals,

Echo chamber for the fanatical cries
of stubborn generations, all the quaint invisibles
death has grown a beard on,

labyrinth of desire, playing field of impulse,
factory where decay's silent armies clock in,
philosopher-clown blowing a horn at each epiphany.

Washed by the rough nurse of morning,
wheeled into the ward of the afternoon,
feeds, grateful, on the rich broth of dusk.

Reads the erratic cards of dreams,
turns on the rack of insomnia,
steals the two-bit grace of sleep.

Loses its name in foreign embraces,
forges a passport to the country of tenderness,
gestures like a child at the thing that it wants,
opaque from its own breath on the glass.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Summertime sadness...but also beauty in shorelines, solitude and other wonders. And some poetry in tow, not too far behind... Summer carousel 🏖 🖤 #poetrycommunity #artistcommunity #sunset #shoreline #roadtrip

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

"My throat like a hummingbird's, mistaken for a jewel." Resharing this favourite by Traci Brimhall, "The End Of Girlhood" — first published in EcoTheo Review @ecotheo.bsky.social 🤍 #WritingCommunity #poetrycommunity #poetry

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Lovely to come home to this powerful anthology For Those Who Despair, published by Sunday Mornings at the River. Grateful to see my poem 'Mythopeia' alongside many talented poet kin. Thank you to editor Rebecca Rijsdijk for including me in such a topical body of work, beautifully curated too 🤍

For Those Who Despair, an anthology published by Sunday Mornings at the River. A red chrysanthemum is placed beside the top left corner of the book.

Mythopoeia

Vikki C.

Rain is a homesickness. News is an old flood.
I dream of animals in pairs. Which I’d choose to be today.

Part fable, or God himself? Which species would survive California?
True things make a mirage of us. Children blossom in the Mojave.

Link wastelands with stray mothers. Become the V of migratory birds
streaming neck-long into the haze. Fearless to taste how a future disowns,

jilts the mechanics of flight. What taillights bring to the sky.
What the sky brings to the story. Before the story their mothers tell them

— coming of age. Distance. Machines. And falling. Falling.
The hot clay that kisses the body. I’d call you if the lines were open.

If our palms could still be read. Say Proverbs. Revelations. Odysseys.
Legends, leave me in suspense. Thank gods for non-landings.

For how do fragile feet touch the fire — after flying so long
in healing configuration?

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

Thinking about the idea of belonging. How it changes for many across time and geography. From stories of migration and displacement to places of comfort and familiarity. Here is 'Refuge', published recently in Elsewhere: A Journal of Place in their The End of the World issue. 🤍

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.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 25/07/2026

Lovely afternoon at Tai Kwun, Centre for Heritage & Art, Hong Kong. In the heat of summer, moody shadowplay on walls, gorgeous work and installations by local HK artists, Hockney vibes…and souls who unknowingly become the subject of an artist’s study Full sequence on IG #artistcommunity #HK

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

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 🙏

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

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 🤍

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

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.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

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'.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

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.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

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.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

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?

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

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

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

"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.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

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.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

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.

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 17/06/2026

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)

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

"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?

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

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 💙

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

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...

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Vikki C. @vikkicwrites.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

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.

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