VIKKI C.

Portrait Of The Heart In Love, At World’s End 
                                                                                                                              
I will wake alone, closer to crimson water than land.
It's hard to fit in with meaning when we are

split, along breastbone like that herring
at the wet market where Mother shopped

— saving money to travel elsewhere with him
in mind. A dying fish glittering the grey,

that gentle disturbance worth a human vessel,
sinking into itself. She’d rather trudge through

swarms of loud, foreign bodies at the edge of survival
just to claim the first batch of clams for chowder

he loved. The steam from the bread bowl easily
confused with his breath, ghosting the harbour.

There’s an early light. A blessing before the engines sound.
The pier where we last met, extends into the vital artery

I cannot reach. You say blue must mean sky. Must be
what haloes the living. But there’s a different hue

around those who pass us by. It bruises the horizon
while the world consumes its own mortal tissue.

There’s a chamber at the core of what isn’t.
Not silence, but its artefact. Everything is

a quarter pace. Disease spreads slower but its cure
needs another century to be discovered. Is it philosophy

or loneliness that brings us rushing back here, transfused?
It’s the oldest dilemma. Trespassing a holy enclosure

to pick the reddest clots of peonies for you. Being the organ
you desperately need donated — but the wrong blood type.

The molten pulse softening to broth —
the fish flung back into its own wild heaven.