Shelly Norris currently resides in the woods of central Missouri with her husband John, two dogs, and seven cats. Please, don’t judge. A Wyoming native, Norris began writing poetry around the age of 12, mostly as a way to survive puberty. As a single mother of three sons, Norris had to concentrate on achieving an education and beginning a career to sufficiently support the family. Meanwhile, working in the shadows teaching college composition and literature, grading sub-par essays, advocating any 12-point font other than Calibri, and editing for other writers, she has been slow to send forth her own creations. Norris is wrestling a pile of poems and other writings (adding more weekly) into cohesive chapbooks and manuscripts embodying the vicissitudes of unrequited love and loss, dysfunctional wounds, healing quests, and the role of cats in the universal scheme.

Blue Dot
By Shelly Norris

You are more than just a jet-setting snowflake
pining for first class making do crammed in coach: You are
a moving data point, a traveling host, a bacteria factory,
a walking incubator, a yellow viral trail arcing over oceans,
a sonic germ bomb, a mule of foreign contagion, an ember aflight.

You are more than a lone voice in the crowded wilderness
of bustling terminals assuring loved ones you’ve alighted safely: You are
a whispering primal curse, a viral spritzer, a lethal cocktail,
a slobbering harbinger of infectious sludge,
a hot wind fanning the flame homeward to your kind and kin.

You are more than a hustler, a mover and shaker
connected to corporate worlds charging devices on the fly: You are
an anonymous signal, a trace, a roaming target, a transponder
broadcasting migration patterns street to street, city to city,
country to country, a mobile tiny blue dot among four billion
tiny blue dots in the algorithm tracking imminent lightning strikes.

You are more than a customer keeping businesses afloat: You are
the first contact, a pox tainted blanket, the dark Prophecy
of the Elders’ dreams, a merchant ship’s rat pack ridden by fleas
ridden by pestilence, the very currency of impending affliction,
a small blue pixel pixelating inside the larger fevered blue dot where you live.

You are so much more than inconvenienced, isolated,
locked down, a hostage, your constitutional rights infringed: You are
Typhoid Mary, a scourge, the longevity of suffering, the co-conspirator,
the second wave, the exacerbation of doom, the agent of destruction,
a horseman of The Reaper’s chariot, you are Nero fiddling, the arsonist,
the self-absorbed purveyor of deaths.