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Mark Helm
About a Girl
A telephone is ringing somewhere, but I don’t get up to answer it. I just sink into my drinking chair, a girl alone inside a box. A girl who catches mice in traps. A pretty palimpsest of faults. My love is like downed power lines whose sparks fly wild about the house.
Burning Down the House
Outside, the moon looms fiery orange behind some pines. Soon, there will be stars, the smell of something burning, frost. I turn the porchlight on and crack a window, let a little cool air in. Drop the needle down on Let’s Get Lost. Angelina says, I’ll let you choose the urn I’ll use to stash your fucking ashes in. So I get up and make a drink. I wear a cockamamie grin, pull on a purple paisley blouse. I wink and doff my cowboy hat. I’m burning down the house.
Some Awful Things
If only you could stick a pin in it. If only you could lick it clean, the past might lift its foot up off your chest and let you breathe. We know you’ve done some awful things: pulled the wings off dragonflies, swallowed seaweed green as maidenhair, hid vile secrets in your purse, put a dark gray hearse in gear and drove it off a cliff. Then, as you drifted down some soundless dreamlike shaft of buoyancy, you heard a girl call out your name from leagues beneath some silent sea.
Mark Helm is a poet & singer-songwriter who teaches English and creative writing at Nashville State Community College, where their time is divided between inner-city high schools and two of Tennessee’s maximum-security prisons. Mark’s poems have appeared in Passengers Journal and Quarterly West (among other places), and their translations of the late Israeli poet Moshe Dor are included in his selected poems in English, "Crossing the River." You can listen to Mark’s album, "everything’s ok" on Apple Music and Spotify. Their Instagram handle is @ProfHelm.
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