No one told me to take all the shades
of blue: round veins in the belly of
your arm, heat at your mouth, moon
painting cheekbone while earth folds autumn
days shorter; The small round orb in gravity’s
absence like Aegean rings circling iris
from your first sight of ocean. Blue
like a question who aches in small
hours. An emptiness of touristed streets
in rain, the inferno finding air.
—————
A recently empty-nested mom of five boys and all their pets (including a bearded dragon named Ptolemy), Kari is also a new resident of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. She holds an MFA from the University of Kansas and teaches English at Lake Superior State University where her students are slowly advising her on how to become a Yooper. Kari especially loves writing about the locations she grew out of: wilds of the southwestern United States, the jungles of Trinidad, and the Kansas heartland. She was named a 2016 AWP Intro Journals Project winner in poetry, and her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been featured in various publications: the American Writer's Review, Watershed Review, Ponder Review, The Windhover, I-70 Review, Roadrunner Review, Rockvale Review, and Penwood Review, among others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.