KATHLEEN HELLEN

beefsteaks

The other day, I didn’t do the very thing I wanted to, didn’t … you know, let the juice run down my chin, like when I was a kid, sprawled out on your porch reading Brenda Starr in comic strips and salting

big red beefsteaks in my fist, so juicy, so delicious, didn’t let the boyfriend in, aka the handyman-slash-gardener, who emptied out the piss pot by your bed, who crooned in tune “hey good lookin’” …  

“shacking up,” Daddy said, in hush-hush tones on Sundays at your table, the ham poked with cloves, sizzling in the oven, the beer in dark bottles in the fridge, and Aunt Em blaming those who left you

with three kids, left you with this run-down splintered house after they beat you with their fists … drunks and cheaters, common law or rent, but o, you dowager disclaimed, you matriarch of shame, you 

matron of the flesh and its temptations, you who ginned it up in back-door clubs, glittered in the speakeasies, showed your knees like Josephine, you who flowered once … how big the beefsteaks grew! 

and juicy, how tall the tiger lilies. 

Kathleen Hellen is the author of three full-length poetry collections, including Meet Me at the Bottom, The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, and Umberto’s Night, which won the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House, and two chapbooks. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has been nominated multiple times for Best of the Net and the Pushcart. She is the recipient of the James Still Award, the Thomas Merton prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and poetry prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review.