she’s in trouble
by Kathleen Hellen
she’s in trouble
After Frigyes Karinthy
so you offer some suggestions—craft shows, festivals—after she shows you on her phone the bloody mess that was his leg before the amputation…blames the paver, blames herself because they’d fought, because he looked away…shows you pictures of the boxes that he makes…puts the boxes up on Facebook, shows you pictures of the kids…a cake to prove to social services the birthday celebrations…says the DUI was not his fault because she thinks you think it’s all his fault—because a woman like yourself never rents a room at Motel 6 unless….
Kathleen Hellen is the author of The Only Country was the Color of My Skin, the award-winning collection Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, 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. For more on Kathleen visit https://www.kathleenhellen.com/.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “she’s in trouble”? The poem began with a chance meeting. I had been driving three days from Las Cruces to Amarillo, Amarillo to Springfield, then too tired to drive on that night, I pulled off at the Motel 6, just outside of Dayton. Her name was Krystal. I guess you always think your story is the saddest until you meet somebody sitting on the edge of the jacuzzi—somebody who makes you realize that everyone is carrying some kind of suffering. Neon winked The jukebox accused you My throat a smokestack The orange pop I had been sipping opened into lavenders of air as thick as ash If you keep this up Kathleen Hellen is a poet and the author of Umberto’s Night (Washington Writers Publishing House, 2012) and The Girl Who Loved Mothra (Finishing Line Press, 2010). Her poems are widely published and have appeared in American Letters & Commentary; Barrow Street; Cimarron Review; Nimrod; Poetry Northwest; Prairie Schooner; Stand; Sycamore Review; Witness; among others; and were featured on WYPR’s The Signal. A Pushcart nominee, she is senior poetry editor for the Baltimore Review. As I formatted this piece for its online publication, I became aware of its spaces. How did you decide upon this layout for “Firebug”? I like the “unstruck chord” wherein the mind moves between sound and silence. In “Firebug” these “chords” are intended to assist in the compression of the monologue. Narrative in the poem advances using the medial caesura. The “silent pause,” the natural break between the independent clauses of each line, replaces the expectation of end punctuation in the middle of the lines. In this way, space is configured to provoke dramatic tension. The device also functions ironically here to suggest the firebug is lurching toward potentialities, toward consciousness, a dynamic better understood perhaps by the reader than the narrator of the poem and given awareness in the lines: “you shouldn’t have done it” and “If you keep this up.” The terminal caesuras lock the stanzas into movements. As in musical notation, they require a “hold,” where a breath is taken. An opening for awakening. A little opera, if you will, assisted with assonance. Firebug
by Kathleen Hellen
shouldn’t have done it
sprouting fever from my head
The cops asked That one, there
That pocket full of posies
slipped A stickiness that
into fists into haloes from a
host of gnats opened
The third floor of the building like a burned-out match
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