New Poetry by Helga Kidder

Recipe for Confession

Kneeling behind a latticed screen, Saturdays you used to confess a teenage fire beginning to flame your belly, tonguing the tips of your fingers and toes. You didn’t know yourself anymore as the fire took over your neighborhood, street by street, you couldn’t extinguish. Each house was threatened as you kindled the fire with twigs and branches you found behind sheds and in dark corners, ate an apple a day to keep temptation away.  You looked in your mother’s cookbook for help.  All the recipes required ingredients you didn’t have or want. The priest had no other solution for your affliction but to tell you, Say ten Hail Mary’s and hope for the best.  Of course, as each house burned, the town shrank.  You left it one morning when you saw on the horizon the sun’s bliss, glittering your needs, the last notes of your song yet unsung.

- © Helga Kidder 2022

Helga Kidder lives in the Tennessee hills where poems find her early mornings where the red bird waits for special seeds, where flowers beg to be watered, where she listens and watches critters slip in and out of liriope.  She has five collections of poetry, Wild Plums, Luckier than the Stars, Blackberry Winter, Loving the Dead which won the Blue Light Press Book Award 2020, and Learning Curve – poems about immigration and assimilation.