When I say legacy

Vikki C.

I mean the plateau beyond bullet range. Nocturnes replacing the mundane hallway. No hierarchy where geniuses are shunned for peaking early. No grief with its deadwood snare. I came to know love—just there. In the pantheon, where ladders are for handymen and snakes. The slow-spun yearning for a stranglehold. A pressure taken off the heart and belly. I wanted the whole entrapment. To hang on a thread, easily severed by a passerby. To seem accidental. The milkweed expiring in the refrigerator, as we unpack another will. There are too many ways to leave outside a door. The sodden field shorn of its girlhood. This is how we knew, something was lost, behind the ruin. No way to avoid the chariot on the oily homestretch. The bird’s limp body, cherry-blazed at dusk. That is nature, you say. Just not the human kind. The odds none would believe. How ancient rooms begin in the open, before becoming a dirty secret. We hand down what we can’t keep: a four-poster bed, a sheet soaked in pearly elixir. The mouth’s potential. The inventory tagged with roselight. But only once. Only when snow is really snow. Enough to want the clean life back.