The Book

Rachel Kellum's first chapbook, ah, is now available at Liquid Light Press.

What others are saying about ah:

"With lush language and vivid lyric, Rachel Kellum explores the many folds of silence—such sweet paradox! These are poems that open us, creating whole meadows in the mind. Intuitive, vulnerable, and surprisingly funny, ah invites us to slough our own layers and lean into quietude." 

~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Miracle Already Happening and Holding Three Things at Once and Poet Laureate of San Miguel County, Colorado (2007-2011) 

"Rachel Kellum's volume, ah, embodies precisely what its title promises. In these poems the author plays words against silence not only in sense, as emphasized by the very first poem "Where Words Wait," but also in sound. She works in phrases that seem carefully measured for the breath, and which both connect to and depart from preceding phrases in a way that left me catching my breath. The poems compel the reader to seek an unlashing of the mind from superficial concerns, and to enjoy the resulting excursions, accepting the awkwardness when you return to focus on the corporeal, as in "Waking Into Sleep, Take Your Waking Slow." The poems are airy and playful, supporting the relaxation they propose. Though these poems emerged from a particular year's Buddhist meditation practice, they are commended by the author in the afterword not only to "Buddhist practitioners, but also anyone interested in engaging with the rich space of their own awareness." Indeed the spiritual message in these poems is quite subtle and accessible, with the exception of "Sutra For Poets Who Would Be Buddhas," where the author clearly had to get a few matters off her chest in order to ease back into the breathing. Even this brief turn in tone underscores the honesty of the collection overall. There are a few places in the poems where my ear was brought out of its ease by choices in word or phrase, but such is the effect of the whole that even such minor technical objections did not prevent my enjoyment of this volume, did not shatter the promised ah!" 

~Uche Ogbuji, poetry editor of The Nervous Breakdown

"Rachel Kellum is a fine poet. Her lines dazzle, racing quicksilver across the page. But this book is less about craft's elegant spigot and more the slow burn of shared realizations. From deep in her practice, Kellum's poems walk barefoot over perfection's hot embers, igniting the lyric kindling in us." 

~ Art Goodtimes, Poet Laureate of Colorado's Western Slope 

"In this beautiful group of poems, Rachel Kellum becomes her meditation practice lab. She allows herself to feel vulnerable, and undo many of the usual modes of thinking. In fact, she connects, through the wonderful Bonpo Dzogchen teachings from Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, to her inner space, struggling with silence and the expressions of sound and words that manifest from it, and allows these writings to come as metaphors of her meditation experience. Sometimes she finds herself shining, other times entangled with her own words and thoughts. An honest account of her meditation practice, especially when she can look without bias between breaths. Among Rachel's many wonderful words, I stay with these: Dry your tears. It isn't in books. It is you. Sit….Then you become the sky book you read." 

~Alejandro Chaoul, author, international meditation instructor, Director of Research at Ligmincha Institute

Matilde Urrutia

Neruda made of her fields of wheat,

earthen ware of her hidden body,

a lifetime of bread loaves.

Against him, always small,

but large enough to hold

his sea, his sea, his peopled sea,

large enough to chew and chew

and lodge in his small, hungry teeth.

2012

Rooms

There is a man in the old way
whose ears are stopped with European women and children
and family tragedy, though his love might speak
a thousand times the same ten words
begging for a room.

He answers her in non sequitur.

There may be only room in him
for low, lazy rivers and distant white peaks,
forests empty of humans but for monks and screens.
Only the drama of mockingbirds
cannot disturb his face.

Must sound and space be rearranged for love?

Her need is a wave with too many mouths.
There is no solid shore in him to stop what’s underneath.
She’s slid back into the deep dragging grains of him,
placed them one by one on her countless
tongues like the bodies of gods.

2012

Three Animals

Let’s say your hands, just so,
in equipoise
on your lap, can’t stop the space
of your chest
from ball pythoning the pink-eyed mouse
in there.
Just when its eyes start to water,
you change your mind.

It’s not a mouse; it’s a killdeer
caught
feigning broken wings to lure hunger away
from the nest.
What’s the squeeze?
Loneliness.

Or let’s say it’s not a killdeer
but a turtle
looking around inside its own dark body,
waiting.

Eventually something makes you laugh.
Your hands give up.
The python rolls away, relaxed.
The turtle
finds its feet and starts off slow.
You’ve no idea
why it walks around outside you
looking for a shell.

2012

Two-Faced

I’ve become my father.
I’m my own good daughter.
I give myself clever advice.
I don’t neglect my oil.
I paint old bedroom walls white.
I speak in fresh similes, like a fish.

But I do not laugh a wish for people
queer like me or unlike him
to fall into a killing, indiscriminate sea.
When I cry alone, I radically arch my lips.

I was false to my children’s father.
Done cuckolding my own heart, true.
I hurt him because I couldn’t leave. He did.
I broke five hearts, plus one or two.
My father broke six and lived on.
I’m bound to be us both and forgive.

Look! The tsunami passed the safe line.
I am swallowed by his giant wave.
I swim, no fatherland in my aching limbs.
When I cry at sea, my salt belongs to a vast face.

2012

She Did, He Didn’t, I May

I didn’t water today.
Tired, I just want rain
to take care of things,
the way I wanted my mother
to do the cleaning of toilets,
the boiling of juicy roasts,
my father the fixing
of broken-down
everything.

Now I’m a wet sky
in a pinched hose,
a dry, stained white brush,
one chicken served plain,
the Universal Idiot’s Guide
to Impossible Repair.
I give so many directions
to ward off lazy pain,
my diagrams flare.

2012

Without Scissors

A woman braids her silken poems
Throws the rope to ground

Anyone can scale her darkest stair
but she can’t climb down

2012

The Year June Stole August While You Were Away

It is easy to sit in the garden when June has done
its work. When you’ve been parallel to the rain
and the sun has not worked harder than you have.
Sitting like this, tomatoes grow early above your head.
Yarrow’s umbrels do not worry you, or the small puppy
beyond the short fence, whining for you and fresh dirt.
Light pictures inside your eyes blossom like blood.
You look at your own looking. Send peace into the garden.
It sends peace into you like air roots, like stars of lilac water.
You are sure life is a garden rewarding your hard work.

But today you see what little rain and too much sun have done.
What your perpendicular absence in the garden has wrought.
Sit below brown umbrels and rusted fronds burnt on flagstone.
Rearrange grass mulch over holes dug by the dog who leaps
like a deer when you are gone. This year, too often.
Water with a new nozzle, marvel at its rainy volume, at time.
Leaves beyond repair. Pick them. Stunned tomatoes. Pull.
Where you pruned death last week, new shoots. Look deep.
Impossible spring green in a convalescing July. Old pictures swell.
Sit still and bloom in the weary (nearly) now of it, not the why.

2012

The Story of How We Survive

After 2 dry weeks of 100 plus degrees I turn off the window unit,
open my midnight window to smell the 30 minute rain.

I have a home with 30 windows. Some cracked.
100 and 4 years of many paned inefficiency.

I don’t always keep the floors clean, or doorjambs.
2 dogs and 3 kids. Moths pee red on the walls.
How many surfaces count as walls? I don’t count them.

But there are windows and doors and walls.

Even a 1-room Colorado cabin in the foothills firefighters saved.
They waited for flames that never came across the dale.

That woman in Rolling Stone living in her minivan in Santa Barbara,
who used to own and operate a desert friendly greenhouse before the crash,
drybrushing her teeth and spitting at the edge of parking lots—
she has windows, doors and walls too, countable, and rain, uncountable.

I want to ask her to live in my unfinished basement. In wet years,
it leaks. But I have a futon bed for her, even 2. The asking is a dream.

On the street, handing out her resume, she earns more if she cries.
I’m ashamed. Have a 40 grand job with summers off and complain.

White paint peels off my garage. Plastic carpet peels off the porch.
The garden almost burned up the 2 weeks I was away.
The patchy lawn is green from the road.

My van now sits empty on the street. Last week on the way home
from Seattle, my daughter and I slept in a Walmart parking lot in Idaho.
At midnight we heard a couple argue. He got her pregnant
and wouldn’t tell his parents, she screamed. I slept through it.
My daughter couldn’t. In the morning I drove while she dreamed flames.

It was a bargain luxury, I see, to live on 50 bucks a day plus gas,
to vacation on a futon in my minivan, scouting my child’s future
as a fire fighter in a place where it almost always rains.
The men tell her she has what it takes. She reads the books they gave
and prays for upper body strength.

We stayed in the northwest for free. 3 strangers took us in.
The family you can find online! Travelers on the cheap.
Because we have a numbered home, they gave us beds.

When you live in a van no one trusts you, Santa Barbara said.
Despite the resume, the woman looking to hire a dog walker
changed face: How can you not have an address? Money? You’re 45?
The rolling stone took her hand and cried, I’m still the same.

Parking between 2 safe lines, she vacations in the views.
Today the choice is mountain or sea.
Which direction will she face? West or east?

The world dreams a dream in which it is not our home.
Home is a house. The homeless know the lie.

Home is the space inside the story of how we survive.

Featured in The New Verse News, July 15, 2012

The New Snow White

Even the white
horse whose mane
you clench
hunched galloping
in fear
of ugliness, of crackling
death,
must be abandoned
at the black bog.

You save yourself running,
by accepting love.
Its scent is not
what you expect.
Its hands are dirty
or too clean.
It may not know
how deeply
you need watered.

You leave
your mouth
open.
An experiment. A kiss.
You watch
whether fronds
unfold again
over crispened feet.
Of course they do.

You are saved
yet save yourself
like the new
Snow White
written
into the world by new men
who have everything
to gain in your wakefulness,
green heroine.

2012