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 Washington Writers’ Poetry Prize, the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review.
where dirt’s disturbed, the limit of the self extends
Seeds. These
bush and pole, round and flat, broad and thin filet in mottled,
green and purple. In pale and curious yellow.
I am digging
on hands and knees—in garden gloves, excavating
tunnels, drilling deep toward intuition—digging
for the underworld they overlooked. The crime
scene—perhaps Cleopatra? absent the great wall, absent
the inscription. I’d kept the article I’d read about the “amateur”
who picked through “facts” that some had handed down as
truth, who hauled up centuries of sand with the turquoise pottery,
800 skeletons, 200 coins—the “down” side was the head of Antony.
The “little” penis wrapped in linen. I might have used it like a gun,
pointed at the reasons sightless as potatoes, the crown of Lower Egypt
bogged and bottled in a tomb with gold-encrusted skulls.
What of seeds? What if these die in ground as damp and tracked by dogs as
I could smell them? What if they curled with worms? Fed ferocious birds.
The sun had scattered on the chimneys. The rain began its incantation, a narrative
without the denouement. I left my footprints in the wilderweeds, in fractured bits of glass
like tiny mirrors, asking: Who reminds you of yourself? I pushed at the edge,
at the limits of the self, spreading east and west the rule of women, planting
in the sand long after Actium.
What crown rests in what’s permitted?
