Flight paths
What we admire is the vapour trail, spleen-pink
against the sky’s particulate blue,
plotting over us a growth curve.
Around us is another worldly beauty,
that of early wildflowers, and bees,
their flight paths between power lines
invisible, and the daylight now extinguishing,
as we lie here, the two of us,
admitting we never were enough,
had more, and still wanted even more,
but satisfied for a moment now
in arresting our demise, we notice
how the contrail still lingers there,
like the bitter aftertaste of a sugar-rush.
What luck
That summer the porcelain cistern slid out of the box
in my arms, landing an inch from the cat;
my father’s bullet whistled by my brother’s head,
past the X-box, through the window;
a dog almost took out both my eyes.
The two-seater plane in my boyfriend’s amateur
hands almost crashed when the battery went flat;
my mother concussed slipping down the stairs.
The indented parquet, spider-web
of broken glass, are reminders as we catch
our breath and pat our hearts, promise
to love more, and say so, as we exhale
what luck, what luck to learn this way.
______
Vasiliki lives in Greece and has worked in the renewable energy sector. Her poems have appeared in magazines including Ambit, Magma, Mslexia, The Rialto, and Tears in the Fence. In 2018 she was commended in the Poetry Society's National Poetry competition. Her pamphlet ‘Fire in the Oubliette’ was one of the winners in the Live Canon pamphlet competition 2020 and is forthcoming this November.
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