Kathleen Hellen
You should have seen it coming
A helicopter crashes off Na Pali coast
the wind a shearing
snatching at your cap, tacking in the glistening
waves, a plaything of the dolphins
slapping chins, slapping flippers
Your sons like mermen
in the tow under the track “I Will Survive,” as you dance
on deck, eyes like clicking cameras, the Lucky
Lady lapping at the coastline where the land
broke in half, where streams cut valleys
into cliffs, where sailors traded iron nails for sex
pretended to be gods
The air's afflicted
You hold on to the ladder going backward, cast
oranges like lures to schooling fish, listen
for the humpbacks nudging calves. Catch
a glimpse of something rising in the flume:
The fluke
The fingerprint of shipstrike.
Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin, Umberto’s Night, winner of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House prize, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Diode Poetry Journal, jubilat, The Massachusetts Review, New American Writing, New Letters, North American Review, Poetry East, and West Branch, among others. Hellen has won the Thomas Merton poetry prize and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review.