who doesn’t love the monarchs briefly halloweening? the cloudless sulphurs licking at the tips? the chrysalis in silk? the instar self devouring? in the garden where she used to sit, the ants like indras soft paraded toward the lizards’ sacrifice of tails the crotons clowned like pagliaccis the squirrels trapezed, death defying. The four-o-clocks at three applauded wanton breezes who doesn’t love the snake, the lost umbilical, rising to the flute of garden birds, even as she slipped from consciousness?
Kathleen Hellen’s collection Umberto’s Night won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize for poetry in 2012. Hellen’s poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. Her credits include two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Her latest poetry collection is The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin.
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