Grace Periodic

No one comes with outstretched hands. So I store up more soft wisdom,
kernels sticky with amnesia. Who will remember this burial by next fall?

I’ve wandered remotely from the magnolia, and now we’re over.
Gathered oats and half-truths that fit loosely into some other life.

Roofs mistaken for shelter and windows for privacy.
There are things I let slip downstream, pretending they don’t belong.

Cedar ash. A deer’s beige muteness. Dripping aspens—a glamour
I thought I didn’t need. When the current takes, I resume my piety,

as you place me back between velvet heads that burgeon to explode.
A red fragrance ensnares, the harsh elements shuffling to forget.

Through rain-screens, migratory birds circle like fighter jets.
When the lead bird divebombs, a cloud frissons over the peach trees

as if nectar were enough for those who avoid common speech.
They perch on black lines. Leaning in like figures in burgundy caves.

The space between lips, diminished by night-ink.
Many ask what I’ve achieved in becoming? So I raise the air

where my arms were and wait for ice to lacquer the lake.
I lean in to look, and though I’m unable to tell,

I kiss what I see—sometimes gently—before losing this virtue.
In the study of evolution, I leave the stray light and easy blues for the unborn.

They know to bless what I abandon. For this, I have practised all my life.

Vikki C.

Vikki C.’s writing appears or is forthcoming in The Inflectionist Review, Grain Magazine, Heavy Feather Review, The Ilanot Review, EcoTheo Review, The Blue Mountain Review, Action, Spectacle, Psaltery & Lyre, Sweet Literary, Up the Staircase Quarterly, IceFloe Press, Black Bough Poetry, ONE ART, and elsewhere. A Pushcart, BoTN, and Best Spiritual Literature nominee, she was shortlisted in The Bridport Prize 2025. In the Blueprint of Her Iris (Ice Floe Press, 2025), a hybrid collaboration, is Vikki’s third collection. She serves as a contributing editor at The Winged Moon Magazine and guest edited the Ice Floe Press series ‘Process-Marginalia-Otherworlds’. linktr.ee/vikki_c._author