Remembering Us In Analogue
Dear___
This analogue serves as a confession folded small into a pocket of time. As an alternate prayer. As a life remembered once in your heart, or never.
As if a penchant for uniforms, I sought you out, not for ranking or privilege, but something physical, stolen from this injured land. The taste of hardship swollen with chaos. A biochemical high manufactured in the mind of a woman trapped beneath ice. You study her edges, her rhythms of change, just to bring her back to the euphoric pools above – climbing ever higher to some climatic rapture. A portrait of salvation drawn by artists at the foothills where edelweiss disguises the blood stains. Hers. Yours. The periodic. Red soils and hormone inequity.
The trials made me hungry. A creature estrogenized to seduce the shape of military prowess – without too much harm or death – until we lost control. You were trained to march, to catch the eye of potential dealings – but never to touch. An attractive being – strong yet too sensitive to forget the art which once bound us. They catch your aphrodisiac across the undulating hills. White blankets of morning glory blowing lush and wild — to tie wrists, ankles, addictions.
Remember my collarbone – cradling a shared sunset. A palette of bronze powder to dust over the day, month, era, unrecorded histories. Particles of a fallen sky scattered on a runway.
It sells. The erotic nature of what they make you, turn you into – another cosmetic face of consummate trade.
I only wanted your undoing, no other uniform over, under me. Sleeves rolled, white as ocean surf. Glistening medals like windchimes swaying to your gentle intrusions. The highs of accomplishment.
Unbeknownst, at a pavilion, a decayed observatory, we become the subject — watched behind a summer’s silken willows. Curtains which shift with winds that caress my hip and shoulder, as shadow then amber. Fleeting motifs of liberation.
It was a place to hide, to heal — or not. To put out your cigarette in exchange for a woman’s lips, hands, cool rain within the zone, you feel and accept her gasps as your own. Perverse and elegant she lets you in, insists on keeping that summer dress on as you enter. Yellow flowers blowing around the great salt lakes — oil slick terrain waiting for a struck match.
We slept upon our troubles, the hours you call verdant, mossy tendrils. Our want and breath laid over 3 million years of wreckage – mistaken for civilization. The glaciers hide the fossils of a once true utopia. Before humans. Before machines. The condition of being enslaved by codes that tripped us into a fallacy we cannot crawl out of. You on your precarious highwire, avoiding the burnt sparrows, the crows melded to lines that go on as iterations, as unwritten music scores. The little corpses drop off one by one to where blue ends and dirt begins. Where feet tread the residual Earth. This is how time passes. Things falling below the bassline of faith.
Greystone ground to dust by avarice, emulsified with lubricant in a vehicle too volatile for a man’s navigation. Disguised as olive oil pressed cold from our mothers’ orchards. The grasses where we’re still falling, indulging. In each other. Savannah up to my bare chest. Imagine it as your territory. Unceded.
A land we might recount to our future children. The ones with no faces but oh we know them, as bloodline, as a burning city we saved while its father drifted off to Satie for good in the annex. The hydrangeas blooming larger than our clenched fists. The only consolation of a someday spring. All else, like my body — dying on the vine.
Insomnia flourishes here. As phantasms of lush tubular bells. The same flowers on the album cover of Treaty X – ambient synthwave distortions played in every public outpost to wipe away memories of connection — cancellation of “the collective”. Lifelines kept afloat on a conveyor belt. Factories producing vinyls with an underground label. Tubular bells — the same flowers delicate hands held as a wedding bouquet while guests drank Pinot Noir and laughed their way to ghosthood — a sick belly ache. A mother’s terminal cancer. The cures growing further out of reach. A sphere reserved for the affluent. Tubular bells. The scent of every funeral reef. Tubular bells. The toll of insomnia and death converging. We crouch low and meek in the arid creeks. They spread as tattoos, as blue veins and mismappings. A cartographer’s disease. Us missing women lost en route. Erased from the records.
There’s a perfume I want to remember. It fills the rooms of a ruin. The movement of footfalls Something ancient in her blood. Escaping. Running to another age. Moving on before a man could catch her loving another. Sleeping close to death in the hollow of a canon.
A black kaleidoscope turning with old wars. No stained glass. No fantasy to pleasure the desultory mind.
There are colours I want to remember. They serve me optical illusions. Your handsome projection fading into the corners of rooms. Of ruins. It repeats as an adage. Bottled memories. Glass stained brown by old medicine that never cured. I wondered alone the Europa coast. A soaked nightdress you wouldn’t recognise. Put my head under, overthinking this sea made for sleeping. Silver on her skin imitating a currency that might float us towards paradise.
There’s music I want to remember. Moonlit chords. Making milk baths of the ocean. I put my head under to hear her womb. How it beared me. How she and I beared such pain, curated without you. I put my head under where water improvizes the fugue of our future children. Floating as seahorses in cobalt depths. As disquiet or some unfinished peace.
In trying to recall, I forgot. It was there you saw my attempts at leaving/drowning. Pulled me up through the thick green waves. Rowed me out to where islands were scattered gems, mistakenly dropped from a satellite we never knew was watching.
It is not something I can explain to a man I might have loved. Unless he rescues me. Puts his head under too, irrevocably. Eyes open to the sting of shards. The colours they deprived us of in the after. All there beneath, with you. The kaleidoscope no longer a well of black. The weapon now recast into a ceremony of everything we missed. The humanest kind of joy and sorrow.
I made a film of our time. It plays out every woman’s part. She was/is who I am now. Still. Recounting the closing scene. Until the audience of faces becomes an anonymous past.
“Leaving that city, inheriting her tears – a fireglow above a lover’s last breath. The cause of my overthinking, his burning — all minor keys and satire.”
All minor keys my fingers play on you/him. Sometimes in reveries, the silk coming away in a harmony that pleases the voyeur – whom I always prayed was you. A man craving touch again. A prison-break of his own crazed imagination he might regret – if he survives the burning.
The lamps lit, just to find our way through the terror. Trace the contours we ravage in search for another incurable human. The climax, in hindsight, a moment that changed our bodies, our soft weeping in rooms, in flooded vistas, in corners of rumination.
Hot gases and orgasmic clouds. Dust in the eye of the leaver – mourning a fresh loss. This chaos a precious mantra, we repeat. Alone, somewhere. A man and woman’s chemistry echoing a beginning, elsewhere.
Euphoric dreamscapes reinterpreting myth. Moving nomadic and unclothed towards the sun. Two bodies reimagining the waves of this long coded silence.
Remembering Us in Analogue – Music by Vikki C.
Author’s note:
This poetic prose piece forms part of a WIP speculative fiction epistolary novella, an ongoing collaborative project with writer/visual artist Robert Frede Kenter. Essentially, it is one of a series of letters or exchanges between two characters, conceived during an altered post-dystopian reality.
Recounting delicate threads of humanity, existentialism and faith, the letter also serves as a poetic allegory for the fragile relationships that bind Earth and the human condition. It explores the complex weave of desire and dependency jilted by isolation, war and the torment of fragmented memories.
The narrative journeys through landscapes of ecological and human rupture, dipping into ephemeral passages of love and loss, whilst surfacing in the esoteric pools of chaos and subliminal beauty. Through defamiliarization, it reimagines the delicate dynamics of agency and displacement as we might experience in the not-so-distant future.
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). 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 and prose appear or are forthcoming in venues such as 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, Stone Circle Review, Barren Street Magazine, Ballast Journal, New Verse Review, Sublunary Review, Dust Poetry Magazine, One Hand Clapping, Ice Floe Press, The Belfast Review, New Feathers Anthology, Boats Against The Current, ONE ART Poetry, The Hyacinth Review, Black Bough Poetry, DarkWinter Lit, Acropolis Journal, The Broken Spine, Lazuli Literary, Vita & the Woolf, The Winged Moon, Literary Revelations, Ellipsis Zine, Across The Margin, Ellipsis Zine, among others.
Her writing and voice have been featured in various podcasts and audio collaborations which showcase her music and spoken-word craft.
Links and socials: linktr.ee/vikki_c._author, X: @VWC_Writes, Bluesky: @vikkicwrites.bsky.social, Soundcloud: VIkki C. Music
Art: Field, a visual poem by Robert Frede Kenter. X: @frede_kenter; IG: r.f.k.vispocityshuffle, icefloe22
IceFloe Press 