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  • I Ching #37 The Family
  • Karen Zealand (bio)

    She must attend . . .     to the food for the sacrifice. His roses for her birthday, white, to hold incognito as their marriage all the colors of the spectrum. Not the white of clouds that dissolve into sky, but one from the spiral of how a rose opens. As evening falls, each plump bud is a lamp of the wise virgins awaiting the bridegroom. Petals with a hint of fluorescence as in the blue of breast milk, first food for the sacrifice of all she sought of happiness for the mystery he brought her of the rose’s opaque labyrinth. Flutter within its motionless petals as of wings of luna moths enfolding a cone   of light. Its mortal attraction, their marriage; scrolled   corolla of its translucence, their children. White ridges and puddles of light in the vase’s dusk-blue glaze where clay is scored into a mosaic of devotion. [End Page 614] The abeyance in which each blossom holds its own death in a dark rim along its edges.

Karen Zealand

Karen Zealand has published poems in such periodicals as Southern Poetry Review, Poet Lore, Kansas Quarterly/Arkansas Review, Kalliope, and Hanging Loose. She is a counseling therapist in a psychology practice in Cumberland, Maryland.

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