Shelly Norris ripened in the wild west on a farm in Wyoming. She hails from a long line of post-Civil War migrants, pioneers, scofflaws, and illegitimates; wherever there is a “bastard” break in the lineage, that’s her line of people. She currently resides in the woods of central Missouri with her husband John, three dogs, and five cats. Please, don’t judge. Working in the shadows grading sub-par college essays, advocating any 12-point font other than Calibri or Ariel, and editing for other writers, she has been slow to send forth her own writings into the cold world of rejection and possible publication. Her poems appear in Verse-Virtual, Uppagus, Spillwords, Academy of the Heart and Mind, The Drabble, vox poetica, The Cabinet of Heed, and several theme anthologies by Sweety Cat Press, as well as The Owen Wister Review, Open Window Review, Blood, Water, Wind, and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers, and The Writer’s Club/Gray Thoughts.  She currently wrestles with several manuscripts trying to strongarm them into telling her what they want to be. More recently, she has begun to publish short fiction.

Blue Moon Sunday

Departure from their norm, the drunk renters 
who tussle and rumble at the end of the hall 
stepped out early this morning with all four kids in tow. 
Their red clunker backfired & stalled at the corner.

Puttering about the minutiae of my vanilla cares
I wonder (the way any nosy neighbor 
does) if he slept too deep, she too light, where
they could be off to so early and hungover. 

From my end of the block, when the moon’s close
it requires imagination to believe this place
is an all-American city—no, really, chosen 
All-American City by the National Civil League. 

Someone applied for the award & managed
to demonstrate to outsiders three ins of civic en-
gagement, innovation, & inclusiveness, & remarkably
the diversity of a 93% homogenous population, 

The Chamber of Commerce erected a stone boast
at the city limits. People bought t-shirts, wear hats, 
& drink from special edition Pepsi cans liquid 
sugar grown in these fields, refined at the factory 

in Lovell, then manufactured in Worland to prove it. 
Along with an appearance on Good Morning America. 
Before that, I ran. Made it as far as the southern arc
of the Arctic Circle. I wanted to never return. 

Of late in dreams I visit the tiny bungalow of a man 
who let me get away. We sit at his table as we
never did, all the language we never spoke 
still absent, no truce other than what is understood

in the fine dust particles dancing in the interrogative
light passing between us. I meet his daughter 
who does not exist & fail to escape before the wife 
he’ll never marry returns from Safeway. She & I


could be friends. Meanwhile, out back the drunk 
who lives across the alley parks his white Cadillac 
into the giant evergreen at the center of the courtyard 
pleating the left front fender. His daughter is a cheerleader 

is the only thing he is proud to tell us 
as the tow truck driver hitches to the car’s rear bumper. 
The fence wadded into a crow’s nest of barbed wire, 
we don’t usually know when an event is once in a lifetime

or when it’s time to bring in a demolition expert
to dynamite the rain out of the sky. Concentrate 
toward the right choice rather than away 
from the wrong choice. That’s what the book said. 

Yearning and Birds of the West

In a white-blossomed choke cherry thicket 
two crows, not at all destructive as farmers 
once believed, sidle together drunk on ants. 

Yesterday when I arrived, a pair of magpies 
swoped from a cattail rush to bless
my crossing on Bear Gulch Road. 

This morning, the most petite
of house wrens hops about
dry rotting deck rail nervous of me

and the calico forest cat lolling on the wicker
loveseat under the nest she is feathering
in the housing of bamboo chimes. 

I can’t tell a wren from a finch
but know a robin when I see one,
my aunt says joining us with her coffee.  

She’s lived here longer without than with
him, a widow for more years than they were
married. Her eyes dull and mist

when I loose the words onto the air.
Her face blanks gray as though she’s never
calculated the before and the after.  

We study a flowerpot filled with resin 
chunks of chimes and gnomes and 
fallen angels the wind has ruined. 

The wren returns with a tuft of grass
in her tiny beak and alights on the halo
of an angel holding a lyre the breeze plays. 

I gather new fallen scotch pinecones
distinct in their golden varnish from old ones 
weathered gray like barnwood.

Little barometers, the female cones clutch
their seeds behind thorned scales; the males yellow 
the air with pollen. When they open 

fire danger is high. Six-inch long rusted needles 
bed dry mountainsides. Two nuthatches squabble 
over a branch. A yellow-headed blackbird

lights up the shade. The Little Rockies breathe
a pine-laden sigh. Drooping boughs sweep
at the air. A Tiger Swallowtail circles. 

Arctic

after Diane LeBlanc

Pearl, eggshell, bone, porcelain, 
stiff tundra, sky, slushy Bering sea 
meld in breakable variations of white
smudged by gray delineations.

Of dwarf birch, willow, heather, 
no dry branch, no brush pokes
through to trap snow clumps in 
semblance of eider or hare. 

Topographically disoriented, to stay
afloat, I trace the ski tracks 
of the sled breaking trail, shallow
grooves easily erased by wind. 

I lean starboard to cast shadow
to better see the ruts. We don’t need 
to imagine the legacy of this place.
Two Inupiaq men bundled

in homespun parkas glide up
on dog sled to meet us, a small 
ringed seal lashed to the cargo bed. 
Plentiful, not endangered, of least

concern. Their families’ feast, 
no hunger in the village tonight. 
Blubber to chew, oil to light lamps.
Another skin to tan and stitch. 
 
The flat frozen surround promises 
only hardness until June. I don’t 
want to see this dead seal. I don’t
want to see these people extinct. 

These men need no plow to sculpt
this endless white into roads and drifts, 
no caribou tracks, no landmark stones 
the way home scrimshawed onto their bones.