Kathleen Hellen
Winter 2026 | Poetry
welcome to Helsinki
It always starts with things that might be true:
like Ringo Starr is KGB, his secrets gardened
by a sentient mollusk. Then Finland doesn’t exist,
its people holograms like all Australians: the people
we don’t know a hoax made up by Russia and Japan,
and really a cast of Swiss actors. What happens when
the circle squares? The ice wall that surrounds the flattened
coin is cornered by Greece and New Guinea, Fogo,
the Bermuda Triangle. The sticks sunk into wells don’t show
the curve. The shadow on the moon is just a figment of a roundness
mapped by Bill Gates and Pythagoras. Or Columbus.
Whose ships were only seemingly dissolved, hulls first.
Will systems then like sins, redound? Re-shoring:
oil beef soy. lithium cobalt copper. nickel.
It always ends the same. This joke set sail by two too
stoned to reckon that the 20 percent who claim
four corners as their colonies, lacked all sense of irony.
Kathleen Hellen is the author of three collections and two poetry chapbooks. Her writing has appeared in Four Way Review, Gargoyle, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Hellen’s work has been nominated multiple times for Best of the Net, the Pushcart and recently, Best American Short Stories. A third chapbook, young girl in the flower of time, is forthcoming in 2026 from Lily Press.