Survivorship
Vikki C.
Extinctions are a thing of the past. Except that theory doesn’t hold up
when swimming temperate lagoons. Finding no one else treads water
anymore. They either sink or become legends revered for their vanishing.
Hard to discern this bleached mayhem: sails capsized for miles
like every flightless wing of a seabird unaccounted for. A widening soup
of papers spilled from the last authority. I attend the only clinic.
My body wrongly diagnosed with a sickness of the mind. Poems are like
the loves I never had, but insist on keeping me here. Juniper sieved through
warm winds until I am quicksand beneath him. The only feral man left,
choosing to consume the last berries and rations. Gorged intimately only
with himself, casting his own precious white seeds away, instead of making
inroads to my body. Denied a shared pleasure, I am forced to raid the
one hive. Risk being stung one last time, cover my tongue and hands
in a different stickiness until they glow luminescent at sundown.
Until they attract a tiny army, hungering a much sweeter life to carry forward.
Vikki C. is a London-born poet and essayist whose writing has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and the Orison Best Spiritual Literature. Her work has appeared in over 80 publications across US, Canada, UK and Europe. Recent venues include The Inflectionist Review, EcoTheo Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Psaltery & Lyre, Grain Lit Magazine, Harpy Hybrid Review, Sweet Literary, Cable Street, Barren Magazine, Amethyst Review, Ballast Journal, New Verse Review, Feral: A Journal of Poetry & Art and Ice Floe Press among others. She is the author of two collections including ‘Where Sands Run Finest’ (DarkWinter Press, 2024).
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