She can’t sleep, moonlight’s too bright. Rises 
from bed, approaches the window, hesitates 

to violate the two-pane shadow on the carpet, 
squares of luminescence, same silky white 

as her nightgown. What will happen if she touches 
down, her bare feet settling into all that brilliance? 

Will she fall into a frozen lake, a netherworld 
of endless, frigid shimmer? The parted curtains 

and carpet, opalescent pink, everything blurred, 
dizzied with the heavy velocity of dreams. 

The Girl by the Window (oil on canvas painting, 1893)
by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944)

Held by Art Institute of Chicago

(Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons on 23 August 2023)

Karen George

is the author of three poetry collections from Dos Madres Press: Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), and Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021). Her poem “Because every moment’s an occasion for attention” won the Slippery Elm Prize in poetry for 2022, and her short-story collection How We Fracture, which won the Rosemary Daniell Fiction Prize, is forthcoming from Minerva Rising Press later this year.

Her work has appeared in Cultural Daily, I-70 Review, Naugatuck River Review, Panoply, Poet Lore, Salamander, Sheila-Na-Gig online, The Adirondack Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Indianapolis Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her poetry reviews appear in Poetry Matters.

Author’s website: https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Karen L. George: Three Poems in Cultural Daily (21 July 2022), inspired by three paintings by Andrea Kowch

⚡ Emily Carr: Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky (1932–35), ekphrastic poem by Karen George in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 6, January 2021)