It was the day when the stars spun and the moon waited for the sun to rise. It was the hour when the wild within burst forth and painted the earth with a potluck of colors. Sea breezes tickled the leaves and they bloomed with hues of purple haze, torch lake blue and a warm magenta. The white bird now stood upon legs of gold and the seer’s skin glowed a velvety bronze as the shadow of a soft crescent moon coalesced above her left brow. Her zebra was no longer draped in stripes of black and white. Now her fur was cloaked in the most beautiful shade of dusty rose. That night when the rain began to fall, lines of curlicues spread across her familiar’s face and formed into a tattoo of a map of the wilderness that lies within. If only we dared to be so untamed.

—Inspired by Zebra and Lady I, a painting by Jahar Dasgupta:
https://www.wikiart.org/en/jahar-dasgupta/zebra-and-lady-i

Karen A. VandenBos

was born on a warm July morn in Kalamazoo, MI. She has a PhD in Holistic Health where a course in shamanism taught her to travel between two worlds. She can be found unleashing her imagination in two online writing groups. Her writing has been nominated for Best of the Net, and has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, Blue Heron Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Moss Piglet, ONE ART, Panoply, Peninsula Poets, The Rye Whiskey Review, and others.