Vikki C.
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vikkicwrites.bsky.social
Vikki C.
@vikkicwrites.bsky.social
2.7K followers 1.1K following 1.1K posts
IN THE BLUEPRINT OF HER IRIS (Ice Floe Press) | WHERE SANDS RUN FINEST (DarkWinter Press) | THE ART OF GLASS HOUSES| Bridport Prize 2025 Shortlist | Pushcart, BOTN, Orison BSL nominee | Contributing editor: The Winged Moon

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vikkicwrites.bsky.social
This stunning poem which gives voice to the human spectrum through elements of the natural world 🤍

'Sunlight In Fog' from SCATTERED WINDS, TO THE NORTH by Carl Phillips. @fsgbooks.bsky.social

An exquisite collection which I've been immersed in lately.

#poetrycommunity #poetrycollections
'Sunlight In Fog' from SCATTERED WINDS, TO THE NORTH by Carl Phillips. @fsgbooks.bsky.social
November 28, 2025 at 1:00 PM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
"..its language teaching us to kiss through a war."

'Diaspora' from IN THE BLUEPRINT OF HER IRIS.

Poems by Vikki C. in dialogue with stunning artwork by Robert Frede Kenter @rfredekenter.bsky.social

Available from @icefloepress.bsky.social Link below 💙

(Alt text included)

#poetrycommunity
DIASPORA What day is it when we both wake in translucence? A garden gate to climb over—just to say goodbye, bees motioning of honey, or death by habit. Because 3,000 miles makes us closer than family— love is created this way, knowing how brief we’ll be. Hands slipping from each other’s sides—running off course. Like wet babies a mother tries to bathe safely— mothers who still don’t understand their cries decades later. An old song opens my chest and names it foreign, its language teaching us how to kiss through a war. I wear my best dress for strangers who die after we speak— depressed colours breaking at the hem of violence— for the guilt inherited by voyeurs and canvases left blank. I’m absent when the piano falls out of tune because God can’t save us all. An instrument’s lungs eventually flood while it plays on—even when music is forbidden —even when every child is too far to hear the singing. Without asking—the water shows us our wounded constellations.
November 25, 2025 at 11:28 AM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
"Before the music..." 🖤🎼

#bwphoto @photohour.bsky.social #performance #concert #bouquets #concertflowers #boho #rehearsaldays #orchestral #spotlight

#WritingCommunity #poetrycommunity #artistcommunity
Collage of black and white photographs from concert night ~ Vikki C. (2025)
November 16, 2025 at 12:24 PM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
Grateful & honoured by this beautiful praise for In the Blueprint of Her Iris from multi-award-winning poet and novelist Catherine Graham.

Ty to all who've purchased this book. Poetry by Vikki C. & exquisite art by @rfredekenter.bsky.social. Available from @icefloepress.bsky.social. Link below 💙
Praise for In the Blueprint of Her Iris Dreamy, hypnotic and musically driven, the poems from In the Blueprint of Her Iris unfold and release with lush transformation. Accompanied by Robert Frede Kenter’s evocative art, these collaborations complement and enrich one another. Charged and reaching, they move through liminal spaces and beyond, creating an immersive experience for readers to dwell in. ”Duplicity in every naked frame.”Delicate yet weighty, these poems and images touch light. “How I am obliged to hunt for something that outruns me.” — Catherine Graham (Put Flowers Around Us & Pretend We’re Dead)
November 13, 2025 at 10:14 AM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
A new winter-themed offering 'ADVENT' written for #Toptweetuesday hosted by @blackboughpoetry.bsky.social @matthewmcsmith.bsky.social

Thank you for the magical inspiration across all seasons 🤍

#poetrycommunity #WritingCommunity #poetry #imagist #winter
ADVENT Snow falling in continuous tense as if nothing has strayed. And what to do but begin again, decorating this palace for you. Unpacking the tangled fable, choiring all the ways to give and give. The field off-white, its halflight a train carrying would-be joy towards silence. Who would have witnessed the blue horses candling the steps of my body? Or December’s thin bell we pretend is not the toll. Our feet invisible under white —but our prints everywhere on Earth. Vikki C.
November 11, 2025 at 4:41 PM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
The gorgeous Sunday Mornings at the River Poetry Diary 2026 arrived!

Delighted to see my winter poem 'Washington Square, New Year's Eve' sharing atmospheric pages with poets worldwide. Huge thanks EIC Rebecca Rijsdijk.

A perfect gift for all seasons – available via their website 🤍

#poetrydiary
Sunday Mornings at the River Poetry Diary 2026. Washington Square, New Years Eve Vikki C. No nightingale, just a cold-pressed peace —its long syllable held through the startled language of crowds. I heard it once in the pastels of an afterlife —some snow-song glittering the giant fir, imported from across the border. A centrepiece of how close we were. Countries, war and missed love aside, we blizzarded soft against its emerald fingers. Luminous lunate baubling the west bough, tipping it towards the lake’s dark meltwater. Its gold sun counterpart hung elsewhere —invisible for a brief lifetime. And you, skirting the roaming light where tree tip thins to a different miracle. Counting down, you turn my eyes up, to the coda. My body reaching higher now — for the clearing in your arms.
November 10, 2025 at 10:06 AM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
6.45am Poetry Club for one — plus one faithful mourning dove at the window. When your sidetable becomes a study desk and the colours straddle the spirit. As for the poem, this is how they all begin...handwritten and beautifully illegible.

#liminal #process #otherness #poetrycommunity #poetry #art
November 6, 2025 at 5:13 AM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
Lovely to see In the Blueprint of Her Iris featured at US arts and culture site Jerry Jazz Musician.

Thanks to Editor Joe Maita. JJM publishes work inspired by US jazz, history, arts and culture. 🎷

www.jerryjazzmusician.com/community-bo...

@icefloepress.bsky.social
@rfredekenter.bsky.social
November 4, 2025 at 12:21 PM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
Grateful to have a new poem 'Childhood' included in Issue 71 of @upthestaircase.bsky.social alongside a wealth of talent!

Huge thank you to EIC @aprilmbratten.bsky.social for selecting my work ❤️
upthestaircase.org/vikki-c.html

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Check out the full issue at the link in replies.
Vikki C. | Childhood Mostly, I wasted it, in refuse sites bright with strangers’ belongings, throwaways and condemned vehicles. They are planning to turn the toxic lake into a freshwater reservoir. Permission granted the summer you left. They will name it Tranquility. Introduce lush colonies of fish to colour in the stenciled dark. Powdered pellets of sedatives skimming the water at dusk, to send those creatures to sleep—even as light radiation peaks. The glow must have been my mother visiting, as promised. She, another site of special scientific interest, treated too late. Each time those harsh rays shone through her like sabers, I innocently sketched them around another circle—to make a new sun. Below, an emerald landscape reaching to meet it, the sprinkler set to a gentle spray. My father walking through the rainbowed spectrum, as if returning. I would wait—longer than I counted—for his steps to draw near, for the key to turn in the lock, and amber to pour through the crack, illuminating the pairs of animal figures, who waited too. The ending was less than he remembers—a rearrangement of night and TV static, the bent August heat on oily kneecapped roads. Some alien waterlilies, like retired ballerinas, larger than a man’s fists, overtaking the sidewalks. Surviving, rootless. Like all other variables, the experts couldn't explain such condition. Water versus concrete. Truth versus playground. The vapour in those polished mason jars, never too tightly sealed.
November 1, 2025 at 3:19 PM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
"How did we learn it without the rooms we first imagined?"

'Inheritance' – the second poem of mine in Rawhead Journal's 'Bloody Bones' Special issue #1.

My thanks to EIC John T. Leonard.

@rawheadjournal.bsky.social

Enjoy the full issue here:
rawheadjournal.org/rawhead-pres...

#Poetry
Vikki C. Inheritance How did we learn it without the rooms we first imagined? The blue nursery to draw first breath, a cradled small saint, before the dark corridor led us to the spiced chamber and its troubles. We’re still searching our way out. A thread between you and the next love, as though myth has animated every statue. When you gesture from that forsaken atria, I can edge near as any temperate season. Its rosehips and peonies in the mind, unprepared for a sudden flood. Who walks on crimson water still remains unproven. I travel against the mourning tide, gather my belongings, and the bald islands you chart are no longer visible. Sometimes, I catch my Mother’s tongue, its sharpness disturbing this thick, glossy lake. A corpse attracts fish, like its duty to nourish, and all the invisible life below never goes hungry. How do I recite such act in one part, on calved limbs meant for kneeling? Do we leave in pieces, or not at all? The air darkens, the waters silver. The thread is most taut, ready to pull us over. Yet here we are—resisting.
October 31, 2025 at 12:40 PM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
A new poem 'Revisionist Myth' written for this week's #TopTweetTuesday supernatural theme (60 words max).

Thank you @matthewmcsmith.bsky.social and @blackboughpoetry.bsky.social for inspiring these esoteric, imagist writes 🖤

#poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #imagist #myth #death #esoterica
Revisionist Myth After Amen, we swallow the darknesses. Discount goodnights. Go gentle. Smear Mother’s blackberries over our transparent skin, in pretense of death. She ties you up…cuts your hair, wails Cohen. It keeps falling. More blood-wilt before the dream-path. Sunset slurring between her legs. It's relative—power. Major to minor. Like a wrecking-ball. Or one lightfeather on a freshly-tarred freeway —if we succeed. Vikki C.
October 28, 2025 at 10:53 AM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
So grateful to accomplished author, translator and educator Jaclyn Piudik for her perceptive reading and beautiful praise of 'In the Blueprint of Her Iris' 🙏

Available from Ice Floe Press via the link below 🔥

@rfredekenter.bsky.social @icefloepress.bsky.social

#WritingCommunity
"On my first encounter with Vikki C. and Robert Frede Kenter’s haunting collaborative collection, In the Blueprint of Her Iris, I was instantly enchanted by the echoes of luminescence and colour in its title. It primed me for my entry into a rich experience of eco-human landscapes and otherworldly realism, a terrain where the trembling phrase, the refracted word, emerge in softness...." Excerpt of advance praise by Jaclyn Piudik, author of 'The Dark Oar, Celan translations' [Full text in image above]
October 24, 2025 at 12:02 PM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
Honoured to have two new poems out today in @rawheadjournal.bsky.social 's 'Bloody Bones' Special Issue #1.

My thanks to EIC John T. Leonard for including my work alongside many wonderful writers 🔥

I attach "Reliable Narrator".

Enjoy the full issue here:
rawheadjournal.org/rawhead-presen…
Reliable Narrator It is in the telling as much as the young mother stitching the fabric of a story to her child’s name. Fathers debate what makes the collection acceptable. That it must row itself cooly towards a lesser grief. My mentor coins the narrative a slow breakup. The complimentary flowers on the motel bed where the beloved betrayed every Sunday. Where faith doesn’t come easy to a preacher. Because poems possess—part angel or animal. What approaches, soon backs away into rearview —tinted and broken. On the wrong highway, you imagine skin around the found bones. The poems honour — they cloak and embalm, filter toxins and perfume the dying. A river is never far from a casualty, and pages lily and lantern, but refuse to float in one place. Because the current keeps moving with your tongue, lapping as language and dragonfly burr, the arabesque of a manuscript keeps the reader from drowning. It’s how we hear through whiplash and sirens—the opaline lake and its dropped oar; the body’s duty replaying the nectar of this world.
October 22, 2025 at 2:07 PM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
Honoured to have a new poem 'Survivorship' included in the latest 'Flaw and Favor' issue of The Ilanot Review alongside stunning work by talents worldwide 🌍 💙

Gratitude to EIC Marcela Sulak and Guest Poetry Editor Flower Conroy.

Enjoy the full issue here:
www.ilanotreview.com/flaw-and-fav...
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.
October 20, 2025 at 9:20 AM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
The @bridportprize.bsky.social
2025 results are officially out. Congrats to the winners & highly commended.

Honoured to be shortlisted (top 3% of entrants from around the globe), & in great company too.

My first time entering, so am very grateful 🙏 Full results:
bridportprize.org.uk/results/2025
October 18, 2025 at 11:41 AM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
"From start to finish, In the Blueprint of Her Iris thrilled me with the mystery and electricity of its text-image pairings.."

Grateful to @ljensenlampe.bsky.social for her praise of In the Blueprint of Her Iris. 

Available from @icefloepress.bsky.social. Link below🔥

@rfredekenter.bsky.social
“From start to finish, In the Blueprint of Her Iris thrilled me with the mystery and electricity of its text-image pairings. This collaboration by Vikki C. (words) and Robert Frede Kenter (images) reminds me of an intricate piece of lace tatted from a single thread—necessarily connected, the collection loops and swirls. Individually and as a whole, the pairings captivate with repeating words, colors, textures, and themes. Each time I reached the end, I started over, looking for more connections and sonic play. I read Vikki’s words first silently then aloud, I basked in Robert’s vivid visuals. I felt upended in the best way, a “galaxy mouthing a name / it has not learnt to pronounce.” In the Blueprint of Her Iris won’t let me go.” —Lynne Jensen Lampe, author of Talk Smack to a Hurricane
October 8, 2025 at 11:38 AM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
On occasion, the poet leaves the isolation of her room, her literary duties, her various wild and broody selves...and heads to the city.

Tonight, celebrating the blessing of being “caught between cultures” — the way she’s always been. Joy, reflection, heritage.

#Midautumnfest 🏮🌕✨️ #eastmeetswest
October 5, 2025 at 6:15 PM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
"...the poet evokes the sacred through place and seasonal migrations that mark the fluid nature of identity, juxtaposed with the duties and footholds of tradition."

My review of the luminous 'Drench Me in Silver' by @saraswatinagpal.bsky.social (@blackboughpoetry.bsky.social).

#poetry #reviews
Saraswati Nagpal's 'Drench Me in Silver' (Black Bough Poetry, 2025) A review of Drench Me in Silver by Saraswati Nagpal (Black Bough Poetry, 2025) By Vikki C. Saraswati Nagpal’s Drench Me in Silver (Black Bough Poetry, 2025) demonstrates through precise, breathtaking language, that rapture resides in tender reverence for the rich fabric of heritage and familial legacy. A vivid and moving tribute to the complex nuances of culture and codex that influence and transcend the female experience, the poet evokes the sacred through place and seasonal migrations that mark the fluid nature of identity, juxtaposed with the duties and footholds of tradition. Nagpal conjures the fragrance and soul-song of a multitextured terrain where a singular voice cascades into an intergenerational chorale in honour of the divine feminine. From nascent wellspring to oneiric cameos of kinship, domesticities and ritual, we are held in mutual adoration for the transformative beauty of the natural world and the devotion of mythical female figures: “These women abound, adorned in ichor, blood and blossoms.” Meditations where for Nagpal, time is both vignette and luminous ancient light: “Year’s lived grow distant, city lights fading / to tarnished tinsel. Youth’s amber demands / have been savoured and sold.” I was enlightened by her elegant vernacular of loss—a liminality that rains, pools, evaporates in all its forms— yet, what endures, elides cinematically from both origin and otherness: “In a river, you pirouette at last: / a wild bird in love with the wind.” Distilling grace, intellect, defiance and empathy, this is poetry that incarnates the ardent love of forebearers with the alchemy of the sublime self, both in the moment, and the ages to come..
October 4, 2025 at 12:55 PM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
"The fictive ones, the far gold
of a rain-blessed prison,
where people play to live,
and sentences seem gentle
and so on."

Here, researching, reimagining, invoking spirits for a special project – one woman, one room, and the mind's potential...

#nationalpoetryday #goldenhour
#poetrycommunity
October 2, 2025 at 5:40 PM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
"In the Blueprint of Her Iris evokes an expressionist tapestry that echoes the complexities of land, language, and loss."

Grateful to prescient poet @msstefaniekirby.bsky.social for beautiful praise of In the Blueprint of Her Iris @rfredekenter.bsky.social.

Out now from @icefloepress.bsky.social🔥
Praise for In the Blueprint of Her Iris by Stefanie Kirby, author of Fruitful.
September 29, 2025 at 12:25 PM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
Sunday poet / Sunday poem /Sunday market 💐

#boho #studiogibli #flowers #journal #handwritten #poet #poetrycommunity #writingcommunity #artist #artistcommunity
Vikki C. Handwritten draft poem, pen, latte. Market flowers
September 28, 2025 at 11:16 AM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
Still, together... 🖤

Vikki C. (2025)

@photohour.bsky.social
#flowers #photography #jasmine #exotic #rarebeauty #art #artistcommunity #saturdaywalk #poetrycommunity #WritingCommunity #ecospiritual #ecosensual
September 13, 2025 at 9:24 AM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
Honoured & grateful for @danadelibovi.bsky.social's beautiful words on In the Blueprint of Her Iris. A visionary hybrid collaboration on eco-crisis, love & heritage — poems by Vikki C. & visual art by @rfredekenter.bsky.social

Available for pre-order from @icefloepress.bsky.social

Link below 💙
Praise for In the Blueprint of Her Iris In the Blueprint of Her Iris restores the organic in a technologic age. This vibrant collection, crafted of poems by Vikki C. and images by Robert Frede Kenter, revives the physical life we suffocate with our devices. Poet and painter guide us back to the ecstasies of the body and to the body’s equally sublime limits of sickness and death. In the book’s pages, we grasp with all our senses the amber, bone, and dandelions of our brief terrestrial walk. We feel the Spirit that rises from what we touch. We remember the ancestral symbiosis—human, plant, animal, and earth—that seeds our joy and asks our protection. In the Blueprint of Her Iris invites us to lift our eyes away from the screen and outward, to a world that needs our loving gaze. It is more than a book; it is a balm for souls torn by the machines of our own making. —Dana Delibovi, poet, essayist and translator; consulting editor, Cable Street literary e-zine
September 11, 2025 at 11:24 AM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
"A view with a room" ~ Vikki C. (2025)

Surrounded by things they cannot own, composing for a special project 🌿

#music #Septemberlight #balm #soundscape #soundtrack #escape #glasshouse #poetrycommunity #artistcommunity #writerscommunity #hybridhours #photography @photohour.bsky.social
"A view with a room" ~ Vikki C. (2025) "A view with a room" ~ Vikki C. (2025)
September 8, 2025 at 7:55 AM
vikkicwrites.bsky.social
"This is not a spectacle, it's a safety plan. Survival is the work we
inherit and endow."

'Love's Tale All Untold' by Shayna Stock (Grain Lit Mag) 💙

I'm captivated by poetry that embodies cross-disciplinary elements which in turn draw us closer to the human form. This stunning poem...

#poetry
'Love's Tale All Untold' by Shayna Stock (Grain Lit Mag)
September 4, 2025 at 9:06 AM