poems by rachel kellum
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Post-Modern Prosperity Gospel of Our Bourgeois God
“Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.” Genesis 1:26
“In a word, [the bourgeoisie] creates a world after its own image.” The Communist Manifesto
Algorithms
Work like we wish
God would
Read our minds
Our Siri whines
Conversations mic’d
Digital prayers
Into the cloud
Into the cart
Where God
Fills
Our scrolling hearts
Delivers all manner
Of goods
Services
Words of wisdom
Curated answers
Biases eternally confirmed
Self-loathing
Anything lilies of the field
Can afford
South Crestone Creek Cold Plunge
The dog fidgets and yawns
nervously as we undress at pool’s edge.
He hovers near, shrinks the circle of his wander
to the pool, that small circumference
that will swallow us to shoulders, trembling.
He who only steps into the stream with four fur feet
to lap up bites of water like a god, can’t comprehend
why we evolved to bare skin, crave cold water,
the runoff of peaks that whiten when it rains.
46 degrees, the laser thermometer reads.
We groan with the pleasure of impending suffering.
Step in, submerge fast without hesitation
as my daughter taught, our familiar breathy gasps
stripped of sex to serve survival. The mouth
of the pool pours in just beyond my lover’s shoulder.
I take in the animal of his mouth—quivering, open,
pulling air through chattering teeth and lips
stretched back in grimace, face tight, panicked
pupils, and calm myself before he does, before
we slip into an inner space that makes room
for existential threat and braces the brave body.
The dog whimpers on pool’s edge, looming protector
over shoulders, senses our mortality, eyes
darting with fear while our skin numbs and burns,
hearts slow, words reduce to syllables and skip
like silent light over the surface. For a moment
I consider my cells sloughing, our commingled cells,
riding this icy water into the great sea beneath
the desert out there, microscopic offerings to a watershed
that will feed no rivers any time soon or ever.
Along the Creek: Land Art in a Time of War
Dazzled by golden canopy,
chance upon a snake on the trail.
Gasp Oh!, jump up, then over it.
Stomp its skull
or marvel how fast it disappears
into rust red needles, leaves
in sand no undulating line behind.
Tear up the duff and grab its tail and spin
or walk into a mitigated clearing, gasp Oh!
as you behold thick bark strips of cottonwood
swirled into a human-sized cone.
Climb it, chuck chunks at birds, set it afire
or dub it chocolate kiss, onion dome,
and quickly know the artist’s hands
are just the same as winds in grasses
piling useless, boring things, let’s go
or singing waters weaving sticks for trout
to stop them in their flow, just to hear
the trout gasp Oh! and rest in shadow.
with thanks to Eric Raanan Fischman,
Allison Wonderland and Leslie Henslee
Crestone Poetry Festival
Crestone Poemfest 6.0, our first in-person fest since Covid hit, was an incredible comeback lovefest of intergenerational rural and urban poets from across Colorado, New Mexico and the Navajo Nation. We brought in water from all directions, in hexagonal formation.
It’s been only five days since everyone dispersed. I still haven’t caught up on my sleep, already jonesing for more creative exhaustion with the poetribe.
We cheered for child-poets, birthed an exquisite corpse, bonded over botanical elixirs and scrumptious curries. We composted jazz and poetry with SETH and the Word Mechanics at T-Road Brewery. We soul-collaged, paraded and bathed in eclipse light casting crescent shaped shadows through our fingers, hair and wicker chairs. We wrote rambling Renga and fairy tales of narrowly escaped disasters. We harvested permaculture-principled poetry from Atwoodian bread and played poetry games in the magic circles of Fluxus instructions.
We brought our favorite books to the deserted island, wandered queerly along a creek dressed in gold and sage-woven tumbleweeds and spiraled bark. We hand bound books, reimagined word-nature and danced in quantum-entangled playgrounds of mycopoetry. We ate balsamic beet poems for lunch, put people first, poetry second, and found poems everywhere anyway.
We grooved with, jarred against, jam band Black Market Translation’s joyful Punketry accompaniment, unstopped our ears with righteous fire of the Beyond Academia Free Skool of Poetry, roared with Talking Gourds elder Art Goodtimes whose bellowing mantra NO… MORE… KINGDOMS! LET… THERE… BE KINDOMS! still whisper-shouts in my mind stream while I teach valley kids how to hand-build clay pumpkins, alliterate, or stop-motion-animate charcoal drawings of women emerging from tree roots.
That final morning, we nibbled scones and jazzed grief. We crossed out our names and scribbled love notes in margins. We passed the gourd, we passed the gourd, we passed the gourd. It spiraled outward.
I’m not sure how poets save the world, but they save me—trying, re-wiring, de-commodifying—one poem at a time.
Long live the Crestone Poetry Festival.
Outside the Path of Totality
I never knew my hands were cameras,
Their tiny spaces human pinholes
Of Renaissance technology,
Projecting what is upside down
To trace the world’s lines.
Unable to look up,
I filter bitten sun through fingers.
How did we get here? This point
Where men no longer fear
Gods will steal the day forever for our hate,
Marching through streets with torches,
Effigies of burning crosses, effigies
Of black bodies flaming in leaves.
Even the leaves of lynch trees
Become apertures.
How dare you strive to turn the oak
Against the sun?
Countless crescent suns
Shimmer in astonishing shadows at our feet.
Black feet of the man I love—
Warped with work and callouses,
Black feet I have rubbed with oil,
Touched with lips, toenails like moons,
Their clippings, eclipsed suns—
Walk this earth.
That day in a pause at work,
He took a photo of tree shadows
To give me all the smiling suns,
Sent it through air to me
Taking the same picture to send to him
In the pause of my own day,
Nudging students to care, to see,
To say something.
How dare you strive to turn the trees
Against this love?
We cannot be obscured.
Our eyes are moons and suns at once.
Arms wrap around each other’s sore backs,
Black hands warm on white skin,
White hands warm on black,
Who is eclipsing whom? No one.
We are love, unstoppable phenomena.
One student called it awesome and awful.
We have no control of it. Heatless light.
Another called it midday dusk and dawn.
Take off your cardboard glasses.
Drop your eyes to earth.
Bless light filtering trees.
Look through your own hands
And weep.
After the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, and the following total solar eclipse
Cul-de-sac
I would let agony
have its privacy
why tell you—every night
all night, the quiet man
of the cul-de-sac
who walks to town
with a backpack
to buy his milk
eggs or liquor
cries out sharply
in wordless baritone grit
often staccato—a war
it changes the stars
flavors the giant
insomniac silence
gets into my husband’s
cracks, plants dark seeds
in words, tone
in the belly of the next day
tonight I close
the window
trap stale air
small silence, sleepless
the cries carry on
inside me, I strain
to hear him, companion
beyond the glass
slide the door
to the porch
take a blanket
to the metal love seat
antique rocker
strange comfort, his groans
all of us involuntary
voyeurs of pain
on a 45 degree night
in the window of the neighbor
between us and him
an air conditioner
begins to whir
out of nowhere
white noise
the day after rain, a walk
music rises tinnily
from my back pocket
a conch blows
a bit up the mountainside
old Buddhist
I silence my phone
to another
and another sputtered blow
then crickets
scratch of my own feet
my dog leaps through cactus
pauses to chew grass
choke it up twice
the air wet-piñon sweet
after a day of partial sun
another dog up the way
barks the glow down
beneath a distant storm
The Great Perfection
walking the bardo
between perfect shots and screens
don’t plan your next post
The Sea Who Named Itself
You should use the pronoun “that” when you’re referring to an object
or a living creature without a name, which leaves the pronoun “who”
for when you’re referencing a person or living thing that is named.
~Candace Osmond, the Grammarist
Lushootseed comes from two words, one meaning "salt water"
and the other meaning "language," and refers to the common
language, made up of many local dialects, that was spoken
throughout the region. ~Coll-Peter Thrush, historian, University of Washington
Is spoken. Is.
The Salish name of Puget Sound
is Whulj: the sea we know,
our salt water. Home.
Wade in up to your chin.
Listen.
The shore, incessant, whispers it:
whulj, whulj, whulj, whulj
Even seals know it,
spoke Lushootseed
long before a white man sailed,
picking names like nits
from his powdered wig
to plot a sea
who never needed him.