So dirty… she says… everything
(she had to give up) … everything
dutiful, the custom to postpone
(how to be petty, how to be selfish, spiteful, superficial

… how to be human), the only one to wash the filthy love
that matters.

Kathleen Hellen’s collection Meet Me at the Bottom is forthcoming from Main Street Rag. Her credits include The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, her award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, published by 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 Barrow Street, The Carolina Quarterly, Colorado Review, Harpur Palate, jubilat, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, The Sewanee Review, Subtropics, The Sycamore Review, Waxwing, West Branch, and elsewhere.

View David Joel Kitcher’s selected works.