my body for yours

by Vikki C.

On some train journey, I have known you. The carriage window a living watercolor shifting in the artist's mind. It is hard to keep up — a field of barley, then maize or flax, a sameness blurring past my concentration span. I'm waiting for a break in the scene, soft greens and fists of blue cornflower.

I want to frame them for my daughter to say When I traveled alone today, I saw summer through your eyes. That rush of finery that comes unplanned, the palette only four basic colors. Like the washed-out hospice room when you visited with a bouquet. How the scarlet poppies changed the air I breathed while looking out in rehabilitation. And here I am, doing it all again, but just in motion. Waiting for a better portrait. Something worth showing for all the time spent watching these crops of labor. Beige miles moving past, my own reflection in the glass – unspectacular.

Yet today, Van Gogh made me look twice. Seeing you running across those clichéd wheatfields chasing a red kite as it quivered in the gusty breeze, slowly evaporating – reminding me how blood itself can be so light.

Vikki C. is a British-born author, poet, and musician from London whose literary works are inspired by science, existentialism, ecology, and the human condition. She is the author of The Art of Glass Houses (Alien Buddha Press, 2022) – a chapbook of prose poems exploring threads of human entanglement through constructs of memory, heritage, art, and the metaphysical. While London is home, Vikki has lived and worked as an expatriate in Asia and attributes her artistic perspectives to these diverse cross-cultural influences.