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.