Poetry from Kathleen Hellen

Photo: Mick Haupt

scared little rabbit

“At five we reach a point not to be achieved again,” Margaret Wise Brown

whirling in the kettle your quick your clot your quiet

—alert larch, violent pale, overt heart big as a plain-white washer deep as a cracked mirror cooked as a sizzling heater your dumb fear bounding into green tiny peas the big-head lettuce hopping like a rhyme into the awful winter awful freeze

the lady butcher sees herself in ice-cold water
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Kathleen Hellen’s collection meet me at the bottom is forthcoming in Fall 2022 from Main Street Rag. Her credits include The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, her prize-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared in Ascent, Barrow Street, The Carolina Quarterly, Colorado Review, jubilat, New Letters, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, Subtropics, The Sycamore Review, and West Branch, among others. For more on Kathleen, visit https://www.kathleenhellen.com/