three poems

by Vikki C.

Heaven versus Heroin—for Nico

The first time I drew a line

was not to call God but to rid the bad signal

between hearing and need.

Impossible sound checks, interference.

Sing like a bird in hot paradise, the boys said.

As if summer fills the left ventricle,

every instrument collaborating

to raise the body skyward.

It weighs a whole life more than media claim.

The newborn ugliness versus the pristine deer

that later has to die under permafrost.

The placenta a temperate dusk between

audience and artist. Eventually, you watch

your life carried away, a stillborn emergency

bringing too much red to the stage.

I call back now to say, rapture is this simple:

fresh snow piped down the throat, piling to fill where the heart was.

The pure kind in Berlin, and Chelsea afterparties—

your chin against the cool marble bartop,

taking in an entire desert of bricks.

Before every great gig, a candle burning at my dresser,

which looks like an altar when I’m gone.

I make the men wait, tuning their G-strings

in abeyance, while God puts me on hold too.

Who ever comes clean, or leaves this way?

You hear the coda before the music,

wake clothesless on Sundays,

wrapped in a sense of velvet

—mistaking it for a new skin.

Conflict—after “Evening of Light”, The Marble Index

Cale has a foresight for doom, so love is easy for one day. He points to dissonance: the sound of a white bird crashing into Babel. We smoke, debate which will go viral on those addictive blue screens in future: the song of grace being killed, or the looping footage of disaster? And if the bird becomes a second tower, what then? Notation is that confusion of voices—love exploding before the score. It refused us at first, because it had to trust the ear’s inevitable delay. And now nothing’s left of that soft wind sailing in through the complex atria. None would admit the engineer had studied the delicate arch versus the bland ache of design. Our bodies chromatic in descent, trying to right every loosened brick. Now, they build hallways for mandolins and record desire as something to keep us in this world. Soon, the wasteland bloats the instrument’s lungs, and I am doing that one thing that makes you leave. There are doors, you say, in and out of estrangement, rubied and oiled for our coda. In Central Park, I wake to a song I wrote myself. Our insistence on harmony like those fleshy magnolias draped above my stone head—ancient beauties that bloomed aeons before men. The equally ancient bees like loaded drones—circling what must fall to be heard.

All Tomorrow’s Afterparties

There’s a crack in everything a woman does

—that’s how New York gets in.

The band thinner now—playing at a distance,

every Manhattan hood, adored without us.

You enter the room vibrating with Warhol portraits.

Original factory settings filtered with glam,

the camera lapping up our gypsum auras.

Sure, light is as light does—an erasure at best.

I’m not under the influence when I say I love the war,

which has always happened. A legend on its knees,

asking redemption over dirty martinis, to be animal

with Morrison in the Mojave—fool’s gold blown high.

Both God and Jim forget to answer

—draw the silver curtain shut for good

while the songs outlive our soap operas.

Offbeat, starlings migrate late—frost studding their wings.

With every sound delay—a greater violence.

Viola of leaves trapped under ice,

a face that is not you.

The silk cries of birds—heard after the music.

Photo of Vikki C.

BIO: Vikki C. 's writing appears in over 80 venues including The Inflectionist, Grain, EcoTheo Review, The Ilanot Review, The Blue Mountain Review, Psaltery & Lyre, IceFloe Press, Feral, and Cable Street. Shortlisted in The Bridport Prize 2025, she's also earned nominations for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Orison Best Spiritual Literature. Her books include Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press) and the hybrid collaboration In the Blueprint of Her Iris (IceFloe Press, 2025). She's a contributing editor at The Winged Moon Magazine and guest-curates IceFloe's Process-Marginalia-Otherworld project. linktr.ee/vikki_c._author