Silver Branch series

Vikki C.

Vikki C. is a London-born writer, musician and author of 'The Art of Glass Houses' (Alien Buddha Press) and ‘Where Sands Run Finest’ (DarkWinter Press).

Combining eco-conscious themes, heritage and mythology, her writing is widely published across US, Canada, UK and Europe and has been nominated for 'The Pushcart Prize', 'Best of the Net' and the 'Orison Best Spiritual Literature'.

Vikki’s poetry, fiction and nonfiction appear in over 80 presses including The Inflectionist Review, Psaltery & Lyre, EcoTheo Review, Amethyst Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Grain Magazine, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Sweet Literary, Harpy Hybrid Review, Cable Street, Barren Magazine, Stone Circle Review, Dust Poetry Magazine, One Hand Clapping, Ice Floe Press, Black Bough Poetry, DarkWinter Lit, Acropolis Journal, The Winged Moon, The Belfast Review, New Feathers Anthology, Boats Against The Current, ONE ART Poetry, The Hyacinth Review, The Broken Spine, Lazuli Literary and Vita & the Woolf, among others.

Vikki is also an improvisational pianist and composer whose cinematic soundscapes fuse classical and experimental techniques. In vein with her writing, her music embraces cultural and post-world motifs that explore the deep truths and complexities of our zeitgeist. Her musical creations have been set to spoken-word poetry and prose and short experimental films. Vikki's voice and written works have also featured widely in audio collaborations and podcasts.

Links and socials:

Linktree: linktr.ee/vikki_c._author

X: @VWC_Writes

Bluesky: @vikkicwrites.bsky.social

Soundcloud: Vikki C. Music

A Hummingbird Faith

Your nectared throat

a quickening

disarms unknown wars

suspending jewels

blessing boats

planetary

pause

fresh mercy to parry

my heartbeat.

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Exclusive to the Silver Branch series

Sundial

We planted light in late summer

the kind that falls unannounced

a pale blossom on bare shoulders

rain sliding off the statues of a lost era

how the sky took us to seed, fists unfurling,

as if fearless of a sundial antiquated with shadows

my collarbone collecting it all for the tiny birds

your eyes perfecting the art of Elysium

a flood spilling over, as it must

bright peonies, protesting all my wars

marigolds as peace signs on every corner

the scent of mercy, in the garden

the bouquet I saved for the end

when fields were fallow, doors bolted

watching from the annex, windows misted

your distant body, a god shaped cloud

along the arched spine of Polzeath bay

gloaming, a plum, bruised in your palm

to have it all, stained with the injuries of a full life

oh…how the storm keeps coming…

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First published in Black Bough Poetry “Afterfeather” edition

Atlas

Driving west where history deepens in the candle of dusk, one is remade as old stars. Seeing through stained glass as if ruin preceded our first breath, I feel your attention slip from my shoulder to Land's End.

Watching from afar is easy, a narrator, soft-lipped, conversing with a stranger. But to hold beauty as a precious thing, is a different faith. Hold it like the day's long gaze over heather tundra and all that is unmapped.

Decanting time is an art too. An unsteady hand leads to a sharp turn where wildness is a brambled dirt trail. But you gasp anyway, with something like pain or anticipation. And departure bay, idyll boats waiting to cradle our bodies - it could be heaven, if only you would trade the Gregorian for the immeasurable. If you dare come close enough to taste the salt of sorrow and its native tongues.

I would be the passenger looking back once at this ruddy painting - artist unknown. I'd curate each stepping stone and tell you it is about a greater picture; silver trout leaping across planets. The compass dismantled. As if the telescope lens were clouded by desire, you are bringing me the universe in a bell jar. Or that on a lifesize scale, our faltering could prescribe the full yellow of joy, of flax in mid July. That across a swallow's small wingspan, bearings lost - I'd love you all the way there.

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First published in Black Bough Poetry “Duet of Ghosts” edition

Adagio

You'd listen like a child for the silk of closing time,

hiding between rain and indolence,

thin shadow, just shy of a mimicry,

waiting to break like all the worlds you've known.

Always the voyeur cutting a chance from dusk,

through every Chartres cathedral window,

wine and solidarity passed around the great tableaux vivant.

How things between us are slowing.

The time lapse of a Paris street;

its quiet women with loud minds,

architectures like blueprints, waiting to be rebuilt from dust,

old light and myth pillaring what you can no longer carry.

And in the saga of greyscale fields – no train, no war today,

the peace of stone horses falling out of focus,

one last blue hour on our lips, your breath

stealing excuses to become elegiac.

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First published in Black Bough Poetry online 'Sound & Vision' edition

Wading In A Field Of Reeds

The field of reeds quivers today, a whisper of your name clinging to ancient light. You whose life was too large for a tomb. Thousands of artefacts reveal the shimmer of a lost world too ornate for our desultory minds, eager to distil over three thousand years of sacred breath.

Seeing the first step (into your soul) - a revelation: the amber candle mimicking the wavering sun of the red lands, your secret riches rippling under its moire skin: a chamber of "wonderful things" heaped upon one another, chariots, effigies, porcelain, flowers…fragments of last-minute magic.

Yet, mystery shrouds what was absent. Stands sans statuettes, gold gildings stolen, your heart taken? Strange and surreal as sudden death itself, swooping low through the valley's papyrus, a death as urgent as the rush to display your kingdom to modernity. Carter's meticulous labelling presents more than your greatness: our smallness was exhumed too, we of the sad Anthropocene. Still learning to cradle our past gently, the way you held eternity in a fine alabaster chalice between two lotus flowers. We hurried to become the dust of our history, trapped in a dark chamber, dying. While you, Ankh, you sat free, living on in peace for aeons to come, loving Thebes, your wizened face tilted to the north wind…

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First published in Black Bough Poetry ‘Tutankhamun –Wonderful Things’ edition

The Eve of You

Here is the still light of your planting

from a shell, it has blossomed

into the shape of hands and complex things

– the brevity of snowflakes witnessed, alone

Elsewhere, a ritual of guests and fireglow

men who worship, the foretelling of angels

how their frozen wings unclasp

the way an oyster loosens to reveal

the mantra of another world

Beyond holy spires and fitful prayer

the choir of a pearl, a pulse – a chance, too rare.

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First published in Black Bough Poetry Winter 2023-24 edition

Ornamental World – Shake Me Softly

Through frosted glass, I watch – an outsider to ritual. Observe a sunbeam bisecting the svelte Christmas lily – forming the illusion of a cross. Beyond, the table of offerings – long – three generations, inviting me in. Place cards awaiting names.

The scene is framed in tinsel – draped over borders, countries – shimmering DNA. Strands of celebration. Strands of incurable distance. Gold flecks in my eye from a holy star – still guiding our ancestors home.

Too long – this life of paraphernalia. Evergreen. Like the tree, pining warm fingers to fasten ornaments around its neck.

I watch snow drifts deepen around Mother's smile. Brandy vapours triggering a dormant miracle. Every window, a Chartres window. My daughter poised angelic above the choir of carols I've forgotten how to sing.

Dear Father, I'm feeling the world most keenly – a globe shaken by a hand hungry to recall the look of revelation, softly falling.

Today, I'll step inside.

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First published in Black Bough Poetry Winter 2023-24 edition

Communion

Who blesses all this white in Arles?

I call to ask if the hills still powder,

as Mother dusts sugar over the Yule log.

How fifteen winters never leave my hair.

The artist still doesn’t paint my portrait,

only the flecks of a deer fleeing some border.

Easier on the eye that goes the distance

— easier on the hand that navigates.

Here, a patina cross, frozen in violence,

the land’s wound soft enough to kneel,

while the ego departs for valleys

where love is pronounced differently.

It’s how berries bloody the snow,

or roaring fires learn the patience of candles.

How old flames cast silhouettes

on cracked walls and far mountains.

On faces irreparable — save for holy light,

communing briefly where you may be.

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First published in Black Bough Poetry Winter 2024-25 edition

A Brief Deconstruction of Poetics

We expect it to emanate from

the longhaul season. A body

as observed sculling the wreckage.

The influx of glitter and lowlight

revealing our shored-in mis-love

in the skerries. Attempts at leaving

punctuated in the undated treasures.

The corralled children of legends —

rubies, bone and tidal consonants.

The precious vase we saved in every lifetime,

glazed with a mother’s warring blues.

Its lilies washed up only in oil paintings

of Departure Bay, sold at holy auctions

with piles of endangered red herrings.

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Exclusive to the Silver Branch series

Dichotomy

They think love and death are far apart. We split. I’m in the study that thinks otherwise.

Admiring birds on the way to you is no pleasure. Keeping up, across tundra, only to observe

the hawk’s wing angled to reveal its tiny bones, protruding, skin taut and vulnerable like a small war drum. Translucent to the bloody dusk as it drifts through some dark valley you once walked. We imagined feathers and soft moult, unprepared for an ugly primitive creature. Like the mechanics of flight and its failures, the distant nest, ravaged, two eggs mangled. Like the closing lines of a poem that keep me beyond expiry. Keep me assured, that a wound could be a home for more than one, despite our opposing theories.

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Exclusive to the Silver Branch series

Rehabilitation

Never enough light or attention.

Just a common love for the negatives.

Their dark films still impressionable,

and what isn’t left as spoiled fodder,

debt or imitation. A vantage point

whose balcony is interior. To lie clothless

and admire. Past the flood of documentation

and masks, where fish take their last leap,

we’d spy it. The nouveau city, we must siege

with our gaze. Numb to the patients’ chains,

the pariah dogs at the foothills,

sound asleep, still under the influence.

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Exclusive to the Silver Branch series

In Polzeath, I’d split my body for him

where frescoes of Skyrim

feign fortune & frieze—

invite frost-feathers of misflight.

Waiting for faith to blow warm,

the way the will is annexed

to heather & shore-sworn inheritance.

Outlands sculpt a skull.

What solemns its sockets?

Unbirded coves the Atlantic

tongues deep for violet relief.

Eves steep with salt & old language.

A woman unearthing her urn

to hold a whole tidal legacy.

To love his ruinscape, to be hooked

at such angle of pleasure—

his bright aspect a debt worth owing.

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Exclusive to the Silver Branch series

About Jasmine

I never once caught violets,

peonies, tiny jasmine constellations,

hands instead reaching for bouquets

heavier than thought —

hands hungry for fortunes to be thrown.

Rice as the Romans did,

still scatters wide across Asia

like snow in Shangri-la you’ll never taste.

How many times I gave you away,

avoided becoming the banquet?

Tradition is to split than to wed.

Polzeath to Halong Bay, I shuffle

aisles of champagne sand & perfect sense,

rise to let others pass.

As sea-vapour tears the vision,

say “I do” to everything that dies.

Fish, vows, fists of jasmine —

the dark always thicker than its constellations.

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Exclusive to the Silver Branch series

Porcelain: For Earth Lovers

Awaiting frost to take the vase hostage,

I salvage our source, before it slips

to some other age beneath.

Film of lilies, village, whittled language,

presumed to float til we part.

You say all fractures begin with love.

Which nectar sutures such precious knowing?

I am of that order: day’s blue curve, neck

sun-thirsting time’s glide over my hips.

A whale mourns in slow-motion,

prolongs a glacier’s design.

Deeper, we translate our quicksilver roots —

prehistories, liminal flame, miracle-making.

Hold out past rowan shade —

willowed, spent, endangered.

In our mosaic temple,

all the water once thought holy

— now rising past eye-level.

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Exclusive to the Silver Branch series

Release

Because I come loaded, uniformless

as light’s opponent in a hard war:

dawn’s outstretched palm is no different

from staring down Chekhov’s gun.

against backwashed hills, her perfect aspect,

long slant of rain, my unearned mercy.

we draw lines, snow disguising the smuggled,

the smuggler, heaven-mined. Translation:

“Her full-proof spirit burns my throat.” Eastward,

horses pacing damages of an unrecorded fall.

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Exclusive to the Silver Branch series

Philosophy Fragment

On such winter Sunday,

jar lid sealed,

irremovable,

the honey hardened

scarred with tiny flecks.

In such light,

I bathed nextdoor alone

oversleeping,

the bronze timepiece

irreplaceable

slipping from some edge

bubbling on its way down to

rest on what was thought

enamel,

finding that kiss on

the underside of water

how I could never hold my

breath long enough

to make it last.

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Exclusive to the Silver Branch series

In the Stubborn Motion of Faith

You choose not to name — the carp braiding oil-slow lakes,

nor the act of cleaning up. Shun the shortest path between

last love & forest cabin — beauty’s nailmarks scratched

across the door. Lose yourself in glass stained by what

a mind cannot hold. Milk clouds in a humming refrigerator.

I drink & deny self-preservation. You raise a lantern —

like a father’s hand teaching obedience & oaths,

ancient brass rings the heart’s valium cycle.

But each rotation rows us deathward. So I neglect —

the folding of fires & blankets. Leave winter as bread.

Follow green incense through a Kyoto temple.

Believe the altared god is the same as us sleeping close,

the sound of foaming oceans looping through our sheets.

As if the real & imagined can lie together. The thinning

cliff calls its griever near & Mother says – look ahead

not down. So I choose eye-level. As distance. As dancing.

As lifting of longitude. This wind-toothed philosophy

isn’t penance or piety. Its vigil brights the arrow of geese

— whose V is sometimes my name. And in landing, one

hole-blown blade — might catch us with stormlight, unasked

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Exclusive to the Silver Branch series

When A Whale Longs For Morphine

In May, you declared it an art

spreading as oil in saltwater,

invading the instrumental.

At cliff edge, we broke bread one last time,

white flecks littering my lap

like snow in Shangri-la — you joked.

What else will I miss in paradise?

How an ocean waves greenly,

a hand gesturing to leave in ancient silence?

How we lay in a temperate swell,

anomalies obscuring the darkening scan?

My dress blown high with delirium,

cruising you to heaven, knowing

June will come with fevered sleep,

—our trade incurable.

Men lean in, showing me how a sail

doubles to swaddle our worth

— how corners fold to retain the sky.

And in going under, how exquisitely coral

blooms. An endangered lung —still full.

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Exclusive to the Silver Branch series

The Aesthetics of Pleasure

In the quietest garden thrive the simplest sorrows.

Jasmine, aster and lilies, destined for a grave.

Feral winds loosen a petal as you sleep,

as you undress, ascribing names to the unbloomed—

a lover waking, clothes strewn on the wrong side of a city.

Beyond, spring is teeming, her mouth honeyed with rivals.

For memory is a foggy glasshouse, concealing the exotic—

some conditions will always trouble our species:

the hurt of sweeping peonies after a gentle storm

—or cutting fresh losses from another’s plot.

Tell me, are you clearing the fragrance or the dirt?

On every path, a small fist pushes through to save us.

The aesthetics of pleasure— in violets drunk on sunlight,

in the curve of your back, bending to uproot them.

This labour of enduring a long rain, reaching blindly,

until something softer recognises my hand.

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Exclusive to the Silver Branch series

Portrait of God as Woman

Though not our first language, it is easy recalling the Latin names of flora out front, even those beyond our own enclosure. The ones that died early under our attention seemed to bloom when our backs were turned. There was tension along the picket fence that divided us from our neighbours. And tension in the pylons that connected us in crisis. Mother disowned whoever crossed the line. I told her I was never one side or the other—merely a river too young to brave the journey home. You meet me in the middle of your life. It’s not a country you miss, but a guardian. Someone to praise your awkward silences. Your way with unread books. And collecting paintings to compensate for missing names. She would have noticed what keeps you awake. The dense waters rising. Fish searching for fresh bait. Hungry for the reflection of a man, reeling his life in quickly from a far bank—the place that left us behind with faint music in our laps. An age too far away, to hear the actual singing.

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Exclusive to the Silver Branch series

My Writing...

"More than ever, the current global climate feels like an urgent call-to-action, for writers and artists to resist, to amplify their creative voices as a beacon through the mounting social and environmental crises we are facing. I write to embody the world as I witness it, and to challenge ideologies. To show how a microcosm represents a greater entity whilst navigating barriers in both form and subject matter. Essentially, my work juxtaposes the constraints and seamless nature of the human condition, across geographies, culture and the spiritual. I like to think of it as a kaleidoscopic, two-way exchange in wonder which involves the reader on a subconscious level."

"Poetry in particular has shaped my personal growth in areas of identity, heritage and recognising one’s place in society. So tackling these themes in my work also helps me process the “film of life” as it plays out: deconstructing experiences and creating worlds freely governed by their own laws. Having moved around geographically for my career, the nucleus of “family” feels somewhat diasporic these days. In this sense, writing is both the looking-glass and the lens to view and rationalise the concept of home, connection and the transient nature of our time here."

"The journey is one of constant learning, rooted in a deep passion for literature, art and the human paradox. In an age of uncertainty, I write to rediscover who I am each day in a dwindling natural world. I still believe that in spite of our differences, in spite of the discourse across our planet, there’s an intrinsic space where one’s voice and Earth’s rhythms segue into a score of light. Where we, as artists, awaken the collective beauty and endurance of the temporal. I hope to continue contributing to that dialogue. And I hope I'll never stop listening…"

Vikki C.

June 2025