Kathleen Hellen

on “young girl with a basket of flowers”

—something rather appalling in the drawing of the legs and the feet, something. —Gertrude Stein

foot rhymes with foot
all men are bull and blind to symmetries of violence
 
her legs a pantomime of bare against the vivid red, her skin the basket
the task to make a vase out of the crime
 
Tsk-tsk I say, to those who minotaur the adolescent, then leave to paint
another war in Spain
 
she wears a ribbon in her hair, around her neck the first of stones
her head is not a bowl of apples yet,
 
give her time
she’ll fuse in different views
she’ll become the detonation

---

virginity

After Klimt’s The Maiden

in filigree a judith as the maiden who un-
heads
 
in ceilings as the genii in the sistine
architecture  
 
a man seduced
by veils
like herod anti-
pater  
 
bright scarves
folding and un-
folding
 
to expose the porcelain
hip
 
the parian
nipple  
 
what of this picture
of a figure
in the center
 
the pistil in the pale
corolla  
 
the flower-
faces in succession   
 
who ever wants to know
something about me...
ought to look—he says,
 
the dream he keeps like Freud
who likes them mostly sleeping

--
Kathleen Hellen’s honors include prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review, and her award-winning collection Umberto’s Night (Washington Writers’ Publishing House 2012). Her work is published widely and has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Hellen’s latest poetry collection is The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin (Saddle Road Press 2018).