poems by rachel kellum
to comment ✒️ click on a title
Reclining Piñon
The piñon reclines parallel to earth like Manet’s Olympia—
stark, of service, sturdy, propped up on her own stripped limbs.
A full length of bark has died along the south side of her trunk,
left her core exposed, sun-bleached. The north side is rich
with thick bark, pulling life from roots still clutching arroyo wall.
Unlike Olympia, she is not bored when I, a john of sorts,
stand before her. She doesn’t care I am mixing metaphors
in the attempt to get out of my head, into my old body.
Above, green needles spread across a low canopy I can sit beneath.
Like a child on a still swing, I could perch on the horizontal trunk,
clutch branches like two cold chains, kick my legs to nowhere, pretend
this is a bonsai and I am so much smaller than I am. I could
rub against its cave of hard roots, half exposed, shed my tube of skin,
leave a transparent face dangling in the gentle wind.
Stray
Hank didn’t mean to nip my wrist
but he did
straining against my hand in his collar
wrenching
him back with all my weight
his burning leash
zipping through my palms
as he lurched
snarl-barking, vicious with self-defense
as the collarless
muscled neighbor dog rushed beneath
its own fence
the one Hank has puckishly pissed against
for years on daily walks
both dogs hoping it would come to this
wistfully reliving
their days in the streets as wary, wiry strays
starved sovereigns
guarding trash and shifting margins
before the rescue,
the softening, the new name morphing
daily into
a litany of canine emasculation:
Hankster, Bubby
Hanky Poo, Boo Boo, My Little Fuzzyman.
Rilke says now it is time that gods came walking out of lived-in Things
like this book, the one who takes these words
into its skin—sloppy tattoos, and all the books
upon my shelf, a dusty thousand toothed grin
like the bed who holds us, my lover and me
in its palm, and the softest offering of birds
a heavy down upon us, gentle disembodied flock
like the paper lamp he clicks off every night
he and yellow light looking into my eyes just before
dark silence takes the room against its chest
like the woodstove with its hunger
its winter mouth, its flickering tongue
licking at what’s left of trees to warn us
like the truck, the roaming growl of his truck
announcing him for miles across the foot
of this mountain, a voice delivering him to me
like the secondhand couch we once argued about
now a wide lap of ease, worn out by our bodies
sinking toward the center gap, each other
like the convection oven god who serves
us orange salmon on blue plates, or the black pan
who kisses our green chicken eggs good morning
disrobed of the mundane, walking out, what more
could such gods do or say or want, these gods in Things
who love in such excruciating detail they stay
hunger and heat
too cold to lower the honeycomb blind
the suet basket hangs empty for weeks
as if, when I am not a window witness
of their frozen feast, the nuthatch
pinon jay and chickadee are not hungry
after supper haiku
the kitchen faucet drips songs
upon the pool in a soaking pot
the scent of spent soup, a soul
Photographs of Dogs
a day exploring the rabbit warren
twenty-five years of digital files
mined for decades from antique technology
boxy desktops, floppy disks, hard disks
laptops, CDs, thumb drives and now
this hard drive—a terabyte to hold
my life for my children and theirs when I’m gone
a ridiculous search today for the face
of the first dog of my motherhood
Mojo, border collie/black Lab mix
and the second, Leo, my son’s first love
an Aussie mix, both animals ashes now
and the third, Hank, a heeler/Kelpie mix
from Antonito, lining this empty nest with fur
a holy trinity of dogs whose faces
I will digitally carve, tongues in or out, smiling
or serious, collared or wild as dogs are
and send them to China where some underpaid
overworked mother will transfer
three canine faces to fabric, cut and sew
them into silly polyester pajamas
I will wear this winter, thinking of children
long grown who sometimes think of me
whose thousands of digital photos fold
into dogs’, reminder of the attention I gave
the beauty I saw, preserved for a day like this
when my memories have faded into presence
and every evolving pixel and video says
see that: you did it, day after day, witness
slow growth with love. Everything was always
there, the pattern expanding, dogs’ silent witness
a silken comfort to feed, three dogs who fed me
clicking down dark streets, eyes gazing into mine
on couches when the children would watch tv
or forget my existence in exhausted sleep
On the Way to Judith’s Soul Collage Workshop, or How I First Met Katherine and Nathan
I was lost.
The man and woman crouching
on the road ahead were lost.
Is this it? I asked.
It’s not here, they answered,
waving to the cluttered lot.
That is when I saw the bird
between them—
magpie plucking brown stones
from gravel,
clacking each rock loosely
in its beak like a rattle
over a cheerful warble rising
deep in the blue-black throat,
walking back and forth,
welcoming their touch.
Oh, their reborn faces!
First it landed on my head,
the woman said, now this.
What we sought—surpassed
by what we found.
The myth
flew off, a pebble in its mouth.
Drive-By Fairytales
Once upon a time after a rain, a young woman walked
the reeking sidewalk of a college town fueled by soybean industry.
A car driven by a man veered into the oily puddle in the gutter
between him and the girl and drenched her, white shirt
grey and clinging, dark curls dripping, shocked mouth a hole
hands out spread, shaking off drops from eyelashes and finger tips
like tiny prismatic knives. She walked the blocks back to her dorm,
stretching her blouse off her goose pimpled chest, wondering why.
Next week, next year, next life, riding her red bike like a mare
mane flying, another car, this one full of laughing high school boys
veered so close that one could lean out, long arm swinging
and smack her bottom planted on the small hard saddle
of her trusty ten-speed. It was then she stopped wondering.
She woke from a long sleep, as if from a spindle prick
as if from an uninvited kiss, as if from her mother’s future whisper
clawing through the earth of sixty years before the buried words
could reach her daughters’ ears. That ancient tale, gleaned
from nameless wives, scrubbed clean by brothers: her father
the king, was never more than a frog in the back seat of a car
on a first date with a lovely, naïve girl who told him no, no, no
and nine months later, muted by marriage, handed him a son—
and later, three daughters, and later, a decree of infidelity
he denied and flipped, despite his dukes’ discreet testimonies.
Later still, as the youngest daughter lay dying, golden curls
long fallen, their father, who never saw a car he didn’t covet
made a one-way flight to her side to ask if she’d bequeath
her red Ford to his youngest son, the seventh child, the favored one.
“No,” she sweetly seethed. He left before her last breath
to attend his new queen whose hardened brood love to say
none of this is true: a sullen stepchild’s sooty fairy tale.
They ride for the brand, his heirs. She tells this story anyway
her tongue a wheel of wooly thread, her finger black
with ash from a fire long dead they never had to tend.
with thanks to Amy Irish for her workshop,
“Rewriting Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends for Modern Survival”
and Maddie Crum’s “Unhappily Ever After: How Women