Kristine Karinen

The Answer

a rubik's cube in motion,
changing sides,
switching colors,
manipulating, pulling strings,
a chameleon ever morphing,
speaking varied tongues.

contriving,
a manifestation,
carefully built,
with no revealing cracks
to allow for light,
nor glaring clues
that lead to conclusions.

yet letting go of reason,
using instinct as a guide,
the answer is revealed,
with release of thoughts,
and all emotion,
intuition given vision.

it sits now, so still,
a solid square,
sides of even colors,
no longer a twisting enigma,
but truth
confirmed.




The Sweater

sitting in darkness,
awaiting the light,
time crawls on its crippled knees.
silent images flicker and fade,
flicker and fade...
as probing continues,
painfully...incessantly.
a sharp query pierces my ear,
ushering in strings of confusion,
tangling one thought with another,
until knitting needles
could transform them
into a sweater,
bearing all the variations,
tinges, and textures
of my mind.

I could then don the creation,
whenever I must see her,
and never have to
speak a word.



Page Three-hunded-thirty-five

she sat,
the book in her lap,
and opened it to page
three-hundred and thirty-five,
where, long ago,
she had filed them
within the huge, anonymous tome.

rose petals lay before her,
now brittle, faded,
pressed till all signs of life
had bled upon the yellowed pages,
the weight atop them,
too much
for their sentiment to withstand.

she touched them tentatively,
tenuously,
and, yet,
they disintegrated into pieces,
muted red, dingy scraps,
with no tell-tale hints
of what once was.

the tips of her thumb and fingers
rolled the pieces between them,
over and over,
till she'd formed a dust,
a finely-ground, faded rose dust,
which she let fall
upon the pages where they'd laid.

then, carefully,
she lifted the book,
took a deep, full breath,
pursed her lips,
and blew the dust,
the petals,
the rose,
the sentiment,

away forever.




Kristine Karinen lives in the metro Detroit area in Michigan. She is active in mental health advocacy, and leads a support group for MDDA.




Melisande Luna Kristine Karinen Richard Jordan Freada Dillon Dave Ruslander Jennifer Arbour