Kathleen Hellen
intolerance
the hapa girl digresses

Pitcher this: Spotlight on “Got Milk.”
The agency of likeness: The brand: belonging

if I could swallow it, if I could crib the milk stork every morning
at the doorstep. The half-calf kid that’s bred, force-fed the kine that’s all-American.
Dad said, That’s well (oh, well—no crying over spilt).
If I could quaff enough

I would be what—White? My sister (milkshook) harbored flatulence like cud. Still crying
over spilt. My mother like the hydrogen she bombed gassed assimilation—lactose intolerant. Why me?
Why did I gene

the milky way? Demanding bottled pap and jacked two sizes taller, fatter—cattled
in the margins where milk is like magnesia. Why did I remember
Do itashi mashite as Don’t touch my moustache?

I cowtowed to the pasteurized, the Nestle’s trick to make it chocolate—my coffee half
and half-ed. Udder

nonsense: the wholesomeness of Holstein over thin milk of her breast. Ah! soy:
as like as milk to milk. As Jap! go back. Still undigested.

*

you are here

in cement town

or you are not: hot asphalt freeing gases in the Kroger parking lot—you’re spinning out

spinning like the Tilt-O-Whirl at Kennywood Park, you’re swerving toward the point of no

return, white-knuckled on the wheel, in your mom’s new blue Chevelle you haven’t wrecked yet—though you’re pushing it and pushing it—“lead

foot,” the sheriff said, though you haven’t yet—not yet—
creased the bumper, busted out the headlight, knocked your tooth out on the steering—

you hear that Vanderslice spun out on River Road, crushed the guard rail, flipped
skid marks where your taillights hugged the elbow of the river

you’re tuning out—slumming tonguing fucking in the lumber yard flunking gym— at 17

the world is beautiful and stupid all the same—in cement town. This wheezing zinc, this
acrid blast of furnaces coking in the vats that dropped them dead

long ago, not long before
it took this long to view the hills in back, the steeper Alleghenies. Summer dragged

your hand along the prickles in the plaster up three flights of stairs, up past rooms that hid
the centerfolds, up another flight past gorgeous blue-eyed drifters strumming anyway you want

it...let it roll. Summer driftered, obscene riff I tell you in the stink of flat black tar that overlooked
the tracks, the PONY field, the river barging coal to somewhere else

you hear we landed in Iraq, in Somalia, left Afghanistan: it doesn’t matter: swarms
moving like one body fully operational, targeting assassinations, shell-shocked hospitals

you climb out to the roof

close your eyes so full of summer, summer in yourself the useless urge
to fly like birds away to where below can't bother