Issue 19
Winter 2019
The candle that I am, the vessel
Kathleen Hellen
in lesser light
in pews in back
I sit outside
the chalice
the cleaning of the
shaftandwick
the bobeches
banished as I am
from celebration
the priestlies
in their vestments
winingdining Why
confess? you have cut
into pieces
the thing that is inside me, the thing
that snakesthetree to bear the apple
(o, withered worms
o, fathers
of discontent! of nothing!)
you have made of me
nosebones earshells
rosaries of grief
About the Author
Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin (2018), the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento.
Nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net, and featured on Poetry Daily, her poems have been awarded the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. She has won grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts.
Hellen’s poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Seattle Review, the Sewanee Review, Southern Poetry Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Witness, and elsewhere.