Kathleen Hellen
Kathleen Hellen’s collections include Meet Me at the Bottom, The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, and Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared widely in such journals as Arts & Letters, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and Witness, among others. She is the recipient of the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House, the Thomas Merton prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review.
Dog-Sisters
“I broke them in,” is what her silence might allege, the privilege
of the elder, the one who pulled the sled. The surrogate
putting me to bed when I was left, ears erect,
panting for the answer. The one who didn’t question
everything they said, didn’t romp with needles, didn’t
fuck in dug-outs, didn’t test the thin ice of their patience.
“Baby girl,” she calls me on occasions, the truck stop miles away—
a card with singing cats or dancing candles. “Be happy,” it says,
when what she really means is “they loved you best.”