Poetry By Kathleen Hellen

         ​Tim Vrtiska CC



and if I tell I have to tell it all


you said you’d push my stupid pie-face 
in the toilet—that’s what you said
when you were with your friends 
before you left, before the trick 
of pillows if our father checked
you’d lost your two front teeth to meth
your pretty face to filter kings 
you said you loved him more than 
anybody else (he said he’d kill you)
goodbye, pie-face—that’s what you said

once you wrote and said I was your only 
friend, you wrote it on a postcard from Denver

​

​
Kathleen Hellen’s collection Meet Me at the Bottom is forthcoming in Fall 2022 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. Link to her work at https://www.kathleenhellen.com/