wheat fields after rain

 You hardly showed but on the bus you suddenly felt sick

and had to put your head down. I was your little sister,

I didn’t know what I should do but hold you in my lap until

you felt a little better, hold you as embarrassment, the other riders

staring, while through the glass the way that we were children

once rushed past, hurtling toward the tunnel, that dark tube

that opened to the hard slap of the city, the long blocks we walked

to the Carnegie—the last time you would visit. You rested on a bench,

out of breath—morning sick before we visited the wheat fields,

Van Gogh hinting in the palest tint that too much rain at planting means

trouble, then the miniatures, pretty little worlds in diorama, then

a casket for the relics of a saint. They said you wouldn’t make it

to graduation, but you shaped, painted, inked drawings that you hid

under your bed. How the teacher praised in class the egg you’d made

from paste and paper, silver-foiled, something glistening: something

you were given, your face lit with the imagination I would never see again.

Kathleen looks at the camera with her face partly in profile. She holds a hand to her face. Her hair is silver and black and falls around her face. She is against a luminous tan background.

Kathleen Hellen’s latest collection is Meet Me at the Bottom from Main Street Rag Publishing Co. Her credits include The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, published by Washington Writers’ Publishing House, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, The Carolina Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Nimrod, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, The Sewanee Review, Southern Humanities Review, Subtropics, The Sycamore Review, Tampa Review Online, West Branch, Witness, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Hellen’s awards include the Thomas Merton prize for Poetry of the Sacred and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review, as well as awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts.