poems by rachel kellum
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In morning’s hurry, I didn’t notice clouds
So grey and low, like the cloud you brought
to bed November named, weighing not
of whales or weaning calves, but two small girls,
seventeen hundred miles between and three
and a half years of no visiting while you hid
in mountains, swam in the eyes of a woman
who could not love, heavy as she was with drink.
I bring my own cloud named October, leaden
with my long-dead sister, our fatherless childhood.
I am not your child, love, but I am proof.
Of what? What grows in the empty space
left by fathers? How many times will fall
return before you climb into the arms
of my fatherborn words: You are a good man.
2013
with thanks to Rosemerry for the whales
A Lumen Who
after Wendy Videlock
This woman is a lumen who
Would seem to understand
How all at once
She’s tube of flesh,
And flux of light,
And empty plant.
2013
Yawning Towards Guernica to be Born
It so happens I’m tired
Of not being able to tell you
What I’m tired of.
Dull thirty-eight-eyed apathy,
Here’s my professional smile.
Screen-livers, blissful killers
Of HD enemies,
Laughing Picassoless packs:
Here is uncold cold,
Hot tiny haiku ices
Pricking 3-D cheeks.
Feel. You study Guernica
For the dates, perhaps
The gentleman’s C.
How boring to be tired like this.
The day the paper is due,
Half the class goes missing.
Our apathy is bigger
Than absent Mondays,
Late October fog,
Synthetic
Carpet hallways
And free popcorn.
Tired of Excel sheets
And my own signature,
I swallow complaint.
Eat paper. Gag. Pay bills.
It drives me to seek
Nothing in everything.
Some brand of happy nihilism.
Brave the hollow!
Like Neruda’s woody root
Moved through,
Words spread out, destined.
Rhyzomic, blind and empty.
We reach to mean outwardly.
But let’s say our word-carved features
Are simply furniture rearranged.
We’ll never know who is sitting
In us, for how long, or where.
But surely, the who will get tired
Of the view and move on.
2013
Salt
I cut out five
People’s hearts
To find who
I thought was me.
Salt woman, I uprooted
While the family house fell,
Yet the walls still stood.
One of the hearts
Was mine, listening.
Its right ear pressed
To the floor, the other to the sky.
The colonel couldn’t have them anymore.
When I fucked myself over,
I was my own colonel.
Now I build the house
I loved and left, over and over
In my mind. Its bathroom
Made of slate and free light.
He who loves me now,
Who heals my grief, builds it again
For my feet. I shower there.
To construct peace, to make
Love, to reconcile/ to reach
The limits of ourselves/ to let go
The means, to wake.
When I wash off the mask, the one
In which I am swimming Kate
Or Virginia heavy with rocks,
His eyes are so soft
On me I can’t blink or turn back.
The voice inside
The mask said his smile
Has baobab roots. That is when
I knew I was worth my salt.
Salt in the seams
Of my dirty laundry.
I danced it for him.
He danced his for me.
We were beautiful.
Undressed,
We washed and folded
What wasn’t us.
Tucked it into magic
Drawers. Our eyes—
Always naked,
Four open doors.
No words walk
The path between them.
How is it this space
Is the house of every god?
2013
with thanks to Julie Cummings for
helping me build an eight-room poem,
Carolyn Forché for the colonel
and Muriel Rukeyser for the fourth room
The Flood
We doubted the water would come
and slept without clothes—
the privilege of the blithe and warm.
Valuables left down low,
we slept, sure four miles
of rising plains would swallow
the river, its tossled snakes
and mountain limbs, long
before it swallowed ours.
You folded into night and me,
Scant light, our fragile boat.
Uneasy waking, 3 a.m.—
highway and house
without a hum. No semis.
No power. No water pump.
(Proud child of apocalypse, I had filled
the jugs despite your gentle jibe,
Oh, baby, we won’t lose electricity.)
Curiosity dressed and drove
us to the bridge they wouldn’t let us see.
Fat men and flashing sent us home.
We never saw it rise, love, but of course it rose
a mile wide. Next morning, yesterday’s
unconcerned cows grazed on higher ground.
I only dreamed it dark and slow,
inching up the edges of my low-banked
mind, the cool swell eating my
silent roads and fish bone shores,
forcing us north of the river, of towns—
for three days, bridgeless, blessed.
Drinking from the hard well,
Love wrung out our water
while others fell and homes molded
one hundred miles west.
I’m not sorry they were blissful days.
Is that horrible to say?
2013
Broke Road
the subject line:
Broke Road
the photo: a common
place we can’t go
like me: small cliff
and shallow waterfall
the center line:
beauty eaten yellow
2013
after the South Platte flood
Because You Heard My Name in Many Questions
for Kim
Electric sky fast conduit of friendship. Names fly.
Straddle mountains. Plains. Hunch prayers. We finally say.
Look! White hair on Goethe’s half-gods. White is also blue.
Poem me. Halves just smaller wholes and you. Heroes.
Satisfied. Sorrow the sweet fat. Sky the root.
2013
Ceci n'est pas un poème
In this kind of gameless happiness,
Words are all Magritte said they were.
In love, forget Platonic essence.
Poet, the mountain needs no prophets;
The prairie already has cows.
Which one am I?
2013
American Gothic Koan
How many cicada midnights
in the history of hotwired pastures
love and basketball
have a black man and a white woman
shot bent hoops with a spilt egg moon
off a Farmall tractor?
2013