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Kathleen Hellen :: Two poems



the mask, the vipers beautiful
“… she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing." Hélène Cixous


look at her straight, and give her back her pleasures, organs      
territories of the body

three not really      two + one and none
appendages  her selves the dreadful guardian
          
coraling invasion   
the pregnant sea assaulted





illuminated border
—after Blake, Plate 39


o, rose
only when you fall

you see him
fat, still

hungry, ravishing
the leaf

his muscled
being

contracting and
relaxing

arising
from the crimson

petals
erect

the bud his bed
o, rose

bending to the thorn
clinging to the stem




Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin, the award-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 or is forthcoming in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, The Massachusetts Review, New American Writing, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. Hellen has won the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. For more on Kathleen visit https://www.kathleenhellen.com/.

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