archetype
The father to his daughter passes on
the subtle stock. The roots of him,
raveling tight around the narrative. “Yeah,
just like your dad,” your mother never said,
but when she looked you in the eye, she could see it:
That glint. Stingy with a nickel, suspicious of most people.
“Yeah, just like your dad,” the wise guys hugging
parking meters on the curb in front of Vinnie’s Diner,
laughed. “He sure walked fast.” In soles that flapped.
as a kid. In corduroys that whispered, Don’t finch,
or they’ll beat you bloody senseless. Don’t reach,
or she’ll kick you in the shins under the table.
Better wait, the mother said, until the old man greased
his chin and picked his teeth, he remembered.
You’re just like him. Every day you make a soup
out of self-slaughter.
for all the pretty petals bonfire peach
purple robe and violet, the little cloven yellows
that dot the mottled roadside on warm spring evenings
my brain drips dopamine
when I walk, thinking how I want
to strip the cherries, June magnolia
call it impulse to possess (I’ve studied this: The pleasure centers of the brain evaluating
the incentives). The impulse that I guessed
when I was still in high school, when I thought how beautiful they were, these budding
boys who smelled like pine and leather, who sprouted moustaches.
Surely they held nature’s secrets: How to kiss, how to make the nipples dense, spot
the trigger with a finger.
I couldn’t help myself, I wrapped their rings in yarn and coated them with polish
so they fit. The collection—six or seven
like pretty daisies on a chain
until I learned to do it for myself, without a proper explanation.
Kathleen Hellen is an award-winning poet whose latest collection Meet Me at the Bottom was released in Fall 2022. Her credits include The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, Umberto’s Night, which won the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, The Carolina Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Nimrod, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, The Sewanee Review, Southern Humanities Review, Subtropics, The Sycamore Review, Tampa Review Online, West Branch, Witness, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Hellen’s awards include the Thomas Merton prize for Poetry of the Sacred and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review, as well as awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts.
