unwetted
he whom she knows from afar
fly & mosquito
there's nowhere I can go to hold the center
Referring to the fronds' ability
The pictures hung in proper places on the darkly paneled walls. Installations, on silk, in ink. Of herbs and thorn. Of incense. An illustrated handscroll of medicinals. A six-fold screen of bamboo lured the senses. She was placing the arrangement. Today anthrirum. “Little boys,” she called them, in milk-white porcelain. Birds and cobalt blossoms. The vulgar dragons circling. A meditation. I thought of schoolboys hurling spitballs in collisions. The coach who jocked the math, who joked in class about some heifers. I put my sandwich wrapped in plastic in the bottom of my desk, sharpened my blue pencils. As I blue-lined the exhibit, the insinuation. One shining leaf erect, surrounded by the maidenhair shedding water.
For Beauty’s nothing/ but the beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear …. —Rilke
He was tall, confident in the way young men who know they are good looking are confident. “Look, you do this for me, Shorty,” he was saying. “and we’ll be tight.” “I don’t know,” she said, hurrying ahead. “What if he calls the roll?” She was wearing a gray sweatshirt, loose-fitting sweatpants, like the girl who sits at home most Friday nights, her hair cut short and tied back nappy. When he caught up with her on the cut between the dorm and the parking lot, he squeezed her arm, “He won’t. Trust me,” and she blushed, as if he might be flirting, asking for a date and not a favor. “All you got to do is put my name on the attendance.” Her shoulder ached. The canvas bag she’d packed with books was getting heavy. He flashed his perfect teeth. The soft September light wavered in the trees that lined the gravel walk. O, God! she thought, he was beautiful.
the small
slackness of the fly napping on the ridge of the mailbox,
halteres still, at rest until it turns at tart right angle, skitters to the edge, flies off—startled?
the shadow of my scrutiny the swatter
on my wrist—welts bloom—drunk mosquito
there's nowhere I can go to hold the center
The before times are ending —Willie Perdomo
The news lights up tonight like paper lanterns.
They pulse and flicker, wheel
into existence.
How to spare the rest?
What survives the rippling lights? gives rise
to name and form?
Thousands without wake, without carriage.
Kathleen Hellen has won prizes from the Maryland State Arts Council, the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts, as well as the H.O.W. Journal, Washington Square Review, and Washington Writers’ Publishing House for her collection Umberto’s Night. Hellen’s poems have appeared in Barrow Street, The Carolina Quarterly, Colorado Review, jubilat, New American Writing, New Letters, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Subtropics, The Sycamore Review, Verse Daily, and West Branch, among others. Her credits include two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. She has served on the board of Washington Writers' Publishing House and as senior poetry editor for the Baltimore Review. Hellen’s latest poetry collection is The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin.
