Re-visitation & Libertarian

Poetry, Vikki C.

Re-visitation

Last time, the gates were unhinged. The rose-tinted rain a myth.

Like October’s uneven sun. The river is full, but emptied with

ecstasy at a whim. Reeds waiting for the wind to make the first

note again. An instrument you hold to my lips. Letting me breathe

into it—like that time I was over the limit— and you bailed me out.

Now you listen with hindsight. But the peeled riverbed and its

wishbones invite a deeper sound. Their orchestra practising all

this while we were boisterous, slinging back champagne

in the garden. No one serves up breeze-slapped romances now.

Wherever we left our bodies, a colony of spiders has spun a

coded complex. The fridge’s glaring neon renders the hallway

into a laser zone. We creep small and low to avoid triggering

God’s alarm. Or disturbing the bowl of still-life on the counter.

They’ll auction this estate soon, but we’ll pay the price—no matter

how high. Cost of materials is rising. Cost of immaterialism too.

No roof, just bread and water—rising. The patiently leavened sky.

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Libertarian

In this dream, my lover sends me a film: In Shangri-la, the horses are running, thundering through rough savannah, through sheer green wetlands. They kick up havoc in their wake. Dirt trails like caramel, breaking under a child’s impatient fingers and teeth. The horses are galloping, their movement urgent. As if there is a place to rush to, before that place becomes another place. Becomes a closed fist or cracked lakebed of lilies that cannot open.

I’m younger here, recalling my earliest lessons, clinging to the mare’s rough mane with unease, terrified where she may bolt to, little control over the beast. My mother on the sidelines, scared, in case I may not hold on as stubbornly as thought. In case I end up a mere fleck on the horizon….

Where the horses keep running. Towards some means we can never know.

On the opposite fence, my father said little. Said cameras play tricks. My father panned wide, refused to have his photo taken. My father closed the barn door in its old language. Said the light was wrong for filming. The weather, too harsh for a harvest….

In Shangri-la, the horses are running—away from the source of startling. A shotgun or the smell of fire. Palominos, duns, greys, and bays— a lone black stallion in the rear. 

The horses are cinema. They seem unstoppable. Their hooves blur borders, the country

letting down its guard. The country, slowly undressing. The sky, reddening.

The horses pause to drink, thirsty, lulled by their own reflections. The ripples contain a heartland. Its rib cage bleached with exhaustion. A railway cuts it in half, the shadows of horses elongating with dust. Beyond, a bell sounds silver after months of torrential rain. The faces of strangers, like snow, unmarked. Here, where my lover is not. Here, where I feel his hands most keenly—warm-blooded, wild––motioning to the next blue place.

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Vikki C. is a poet, essayist, and musician whose writing appears internationally in over 80 venues. Her work has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Orison Best Spiritual Literature, and most recently, recognized in The Bridport Prize 2025. Her recent poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published or are forthcoming in venues like Grain Magazine, The Inflectionist, EcoTheo Review, The Blue Mountain Review, Harpy Hybrid Review, Psaltery & Lyre, Sweet Literary, Bacopa Literary Review, Jarnal, ONE ART Poetry, Ice Floe Press, Black Bough Poetry, and Sunday Mornings At The River.  She is the author of the poetry chapbook The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) and the collection Where Sands Run Finest (DarkWinter Press, 2024), plus the collaborative hybrid collection In The Blueprint of Her Iris (Ice Floe Press, 2025). A longtime interdisciplinary artist, she is currently working on a collaborative hybrid epistolary novella, scheduled for 2026/7. Vikki serves as Contributing Editor at The Winged Moon Magazine. Linktree: linktr.ee/vikki_c._author