Gratitude Calls on Thursday

Follow the bashful rabbits
grinding down late clover blossoms
grazing a shallow trail toward
home and a darker, cooler realm.

Channel time and manage matter
to warm the sun-screened shuttered
summer-glazed house, to exhibit
September's orangeing trees

ringing overgrown insecurities;
to discover among evil's debris
a still-life panel
where potted copper mums flutter

in gold light cones
atop a grand piano
dressed in flannel
its bone-like keys

brushed by beginners;
where mustard, ochre,
penny tarnish, and rust
framed in a mystery of blue

flush surreal and unapologetic.

back to issue

Born and raised in Wyoming, Shelly Norris earned an MFA from University of Alaska Fairbanks decades ago. Poised on the verge of full retirement from a shadow career teaching college composition and editing for others, she now spends more time writing. Her poems have appeared in The Owen Wister Review, Open Window Review, Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers, and more recently in The Writer's Club/Gray Thoughts, Spillwords, Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Drabble, vox poetica, The Cabinet of Heed, as well as three anthologies published by Sweety Cat Press. She has recently published two short stories, one in Short Story Town. She resides in the woods of central Missouri with her husband John, two dogs, and seven cats. Please, don't judge.