Driving to pick up fresh eggs from a poet with hens, I pass red crabapples and Yoshino cherries, one full bloom, the other a tad faded. Crave the romaine salad with two hard-boiled eggs I’ll eat for supper, dressing: olive oil, red wine vinegar, peanut butter, pepper. Crisp, succulent green leaves, creamy luxury of orange […]
Karen George
Karen George is author of the poetry collections Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021), and Caught in the Trembling Net (2024). She won Slippery Elm’s 2022 Poetry Contest, and her award-winning short story collection, How We Fracture, was released by Minerva Rising Press in January 2024. Her work appears in Adirondack Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Cultural Daily, and Poet Lore. Her website is https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.
What We Want in the End
is often softness. Fabrics: a silky, warm scarf snugged around your neck, a fleece nightgown, velvety sweater, the supple nap of flannel or cotton sheets, fluffy blanket. The sooth of beauty, kindness of color: a bouquet of purple, robin’s egg blue, orange; your nails manicured a pearl-white polish. The pleasure of wearing your favorite jewelry: […]
March 16, 2021
The crocus, first in my yard to bloom, purple with tiny orange kernel—blossom within blossom. Ground saturated from a foot of snow three weeks ago. Now, magnolia—white feathered with pink stripes; furry gray-green sepal they open from; the way sun filters through slim petals. Spring’s early yellows: witch hazel, forsythia, daffodils, meadow […]
Georgia O’Keeffe’s At the Rodeo, New Mexico, 1929
I Circles within circles: red, brown, mustard, green, blue— multiple eyelids—tiny pupil, scarlet iris with feathered edges radiates waves of pink, yellow, aqua blood vessels that triangulate the white. II A camera lens: interlocking rings to adjust your view. III Hypnotic, dizzying. IV My first and only time at Florence Speedway, car races on a […]
Georgia O’Keeffe’s Series I, No. 8, 1919
I Green apple split top to bottom encapsulated in a blue severed heart hugged by rhythmic pink pulmonary vessels clasping lung sacs—twin bellows Will the halved mirror images stitch the fissures whole? II My parents, first husband, all emphysema. Second one, lung cancer. Me as a child, asthma, inhaler hidden—my secret defect.