Kathleen Hellen

one-hit wonder

he got into my head like lousy violin. like cricket Macarena. like top ten on the billboard of obsessions. his vocal instigations filling up the p.m. with a wonky sound so loud i had to stop my ears with cotton. a little one-note scrubbing so intently so persistent he’d etched into the patterns of my brain that folded into shapes. colors. my little night apollo drumming drumming drumming in frequencies above the hum of drone. helicopter. a bawling siren rubbed into the summer. i tried to find another focus. green noise. attention to my breathing … no luck. no love. the constant cover.

 

ars poetica w/ gun
When it feels right I just pulled the trigger. — Annie Oakley

you can’t think
too much about it
can’t dwell

on wolves disguised as human
who took you in
who raised the welts
that raise the past

just put your finger
on the trigger
of the muzzle-loading rifle

aim
shoot to kill
leave the meat for siblings

 

my dinner w/ exxon

crudites, lobbying w/ drought. distraught
with fertilizer

carrot sticks percolating w/ the whiff
of methane in the spinach flecked w/ microplastics

cheeses slightly odd w/ estrogen in run off

bloody beef cooped up w/ pig-fat belching gases — just

kill me.

 

code red

 stay cool, i tell myself. (note: someone’s posted pics of bread that’s baking on a dashboard) here. not enough cooling centers. streets with trees. i’m wearing the iv. a “little stroke” from heat. stay hydrated. (note: machines vending water look fatigued). i browse talk shows on a battery of wide-screen tvs. heat dome. records set.degrees. (note: grayheads in their wheelchairs in ac. shivering in blankets). how we stick it out. how we bear the daily stuff as thick steel doors open to a hole shaped like a donut. i’m carried through to images of bone. tissue scanned like bar code. stay alert. (note: random girl outside the glass who thrashes with the badges) (girl like spark. like cigarette like bottle rocket)

 

rescue dogs

i named then truth and beauty. walk them pissing. wagging past the practice field where cars line up like shimmering shields that flank the sidelines. we walk along the row houses. past sirens at the arco singing sin in lotto tickets. past drunken gods at joe’s place. grumbling in their grapes with lotus eaters. beauty sniffs the fortune in the air as we pass cassandra’s psychic healer. pass goldie’s seafood where a thetis silver haired emerges from a sea-green door and floats with takeout for the kids. the dogs tug at their leashes. almost there. almost home. where truth is leading. where the story is i’ll find out why i left. who I am. why it matters. epic.

 

Kathleen Hellen is the recipient of the James Still Award, the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Her debut collection Umberto’s Night won the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Hellen is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, Meet Me at the Bottom, and two chapbooks. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, The Carolina Quarterly, Colorado Review, jubilat, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, Witness, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.