Kathleen Hellen | Inside the Eye of the Narcissus

Kathleen Hellen is the author of the collection Umberto's Night, winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Her poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry East, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, the Sewanee Review, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. With poems nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, Hellen is a past recipient of the Thomas Merton poetry prize, the H.O.W. Journal poetry prize, and the Washington Square Review Poetry Prize.

Also by Kathleen Hellen: Umberto's Night Pentimento Four Poems

Tundras
November 2017
edited by Rosebud Ben-Oni

Kathleen Hellen

Inside the Eye of the Narcissus

Along a tarp of late forsythia as thin a tinctured spring. The yellow dust the radio calls "spunk" disturbs me. A hundred tongues that swarm in scarlet-bud until the golden horses of his nakedness have run. Petals pleat after the freezing. Ripeness withers, as it should. My slit a blunted slice of done concubinage. I am tired of these games of sudden spring. I am sick of bloom & wing & everything provoking.

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