no milkstork at the bombed-out shrine in Hamamatsu
no wholesomeness three sizes bigger, fatter
my mother said that people brewed the tender leaves that steeped
in fragrant matcha, mastered yeast
from rice the poets tended
no kine that cattled cud—no farmers choking on the gases
who were these half-calf kids who schooled me in belonging?
who pyramided pap? how did I learn to skim secretions? Mustache
Hershey’s trick to make it chocolate
herding, as I did, into brand. The agency of likeness
what’s 2 percent of fitting in?
They’ll never love you, my mother said, and so I bleached and fanned
these lines, sniffed and rolled, massaged in handfuls—perhaps over nurtured
made my bed with poets drunk on sake—
the grain hauled up from the flooded fields in nets, like fish
the brew I tried to master
You have to bend like the bamboo, my mother said
until the snow in Sudo
Honke falls again
until the last
intuitive bottle
Kathleen Hellen is the recipient of the James Still Award, the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Her debut collection Umberto’s Night won the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House. She is the author of The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, Meet Me at the Bottom, and two chapbooks.
