ROOM 237
Your mother is a bathtub cigarette. Your father’s hopping to the bells of lurid sex. You’re moored in rules you never vet. The more or less of dislocations. The space adjacent to the disenchanted mission ... da da da da da da ... one small step into the room called you’ll be sorry where knobs twist. Facts hinge.
One night a monster tampered with the myth. Gassed spigots. Fiddled death. All work, no play. Remember? The sign you overlooked when johnny got his ax. Arbeit macht frei. Who ashed the sacred rituals? Slaughtered sheep and pigs. Who who who says owl. Says fish. Red shadows singing what’s forbidden. Singing trances. Ghost dance
causing problems. Interfering. Big-wheeling in the labyrinth of dull boys dressed like bears and giving head. You need a bat. You need a snowcat. You need to think things overlooked. You need to think things through. What lives in your mouth is illusion. Watch a rerun of the movie. In the room called you’ll be sorry, one more war and you’ll be dead.
Kathleen Hellen
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.
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