What Rough Beast | Poem for July 25, 2019

Kathleen Hellen
now! the ark

He’d not got far—that one, pushing everything
he had in a cart in Giant’s lot, the rain-on-his-parade
that was his graduation. Hey, he said, as if I might
have saved him, but I was bucketing and bailing,
the skyspit thrashing at our knees, rising to the planking
of the jiggered trees, the rivers jumping banks, swiping
steering, the wrecks of pickups, SUVs stalling in the quick
charybdis wire-weeding, lapping at the riprapped, sandbagged
causeways, the puddled upside-down on islands of the world
and everywhere the sinking feeling we had failed the coasts
from Hampton Roads to Ganges, the rest was mythical.

Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin (Saddle Road Press, 2018); Umberto’s Night (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2012), winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize; and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Pentimento (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in journals including American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, and others, as well as in Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse (Lost Horse Press, 2017). Visit kathleenhellen.com .

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