poems by rachel kellum
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Magnetic Poem Four
We haunt
Clean farm scent
Winter-soon stars
Little nests
Sky bound animals
Familiar pumpkin
Love bird inside
My kind of castle
2016
Growing Legs
You lost what you called freedom in the lightning strike
Of conception. Cells split for months until you split,
Pushing the fleshy proof of interdependence out
From between streaked legs that could not
Walk away nor deny the tiny mouths of otherness,
The need to pour yourself into helplessness
Personified in bodies that broke off, broke out
Of yours, freed into air. Despite the erroneous belief
You nurtured in your early twenties—everyone
Is responsible for only themselves—you let your body
Teach you something new about love. This is what
Happens when you have grown six legs inside. Freedom
Returns when they, in turn, walk away from you
For good, and you can’t stop shedding. One day you do.
You almost start believing you have only one heart.
2016
Vigil
“They All Slept Here” by Ilenia Pezzaniti
Our bed is not stained with droplets
of old blood. There is no chair on which
to prop an Impressionist print
of two ladies walking away with parasols,
nor antique TV pixels jealous of their stillness.
We have no faux wood headboard.
Our room is no hotel or photo.
A blue, white and green
painting hangs over our heads,
large with trying to be water and air
and the space between,
as though three elements could be
simple color and their memory enough
to soothe me in the dark on clean sheets.
Startled awake, my pulse believes
you are the man on screen
stranded in the middle of a road
walking away from death,
helicopter hovering overhead,
disembodied voice seeing just enough
of size and skin to summarize you.
Any move you make to reach for phone,
I.D., risks your body’s claim
to blue, white and green.
No last text I’m on my way.
From above, at dusk, we don’t know
if the pixelated bloom on your shirt
is black or red.
I blink in the dark.
I can’t see you.
You breathe, refuse screens.
Pressed against your heat,
I let you sleep.
2016
for the family of Terence Crutcher
Renku with Plums
Five plums on three tables,
Six poets hunch over pens
To start their renku
My pen shakes with fear
The silence calms these thorns
My voice echoes in harmony
But the words are garbled
And confusion reigns
A storm blows in from the west
Thunder and wind shake us
Shatter of tree trunk
Now even the breath is old
The end comes too soon
But the middle blooms hyacinth and rose
Aspen embrace and feed each other
Their roots hold hands deep in the earth
Send up new-barked bodies
That bears mark with claws
That laces eyes with scars
Steadily willing to see
Seeing is overrated
Sometimes it is good
To close eyes and be
Ears bring in the news
Delicate and slender or wide and wild
If good news, beware,
As bad news is hiding somewhere
If bad news, cheer, good news is near
Your dear hide and tan
Hide beneath life’s skin
The skin of this plum
Is already dreaming of teeth
It wants to know its inner color
(Made at Ziggies Poetry Festival, July 2016, with Jimi Bernath, Valerie Szarek, James Steele, Cathy Casper, and a woman whose name escapes me, my apologies. Learn more about the Renku form here.)
Poem for Wilma Mankiller
The entire family rolled chaos
To have a pure prayer.
I tried death, felt its gift
As the woman who lived before,
The woman who lives afterward.
Steady.
To the mailbox, onto the ground,
Grapefruit, pencil, hairbrush,
Toothbrush, vision of fingers,
Hands, arms, throat, water,
Forty pounds, nose, eyes.
Closed, my existence.
I broke, breathing death,
Absolutely still.
My God! That is what I have!
A good mind.
2016
A found poem from her biography, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People, pages 226-229
Renku with Puncture Vine
Goat-heads stick in my rubber soles.
The feral cat follows me too close.
I trip, lose a shoe, foot a pin cushion
Of porcupine quills
Screaming rock lyrics to the stars.
Can you hear me?
Can you feel me?
Shall I poke you harder?
I wipe my soles on the mat outside.
Later, in the mudroom, my lover groans, “Ouch!”
by
Rachel Kellum
Timmy Fritzler
Dorell Drake
Someday I Will Love Rachel Kellum
When your father no longer remembers you,
you will leap from his forgiven salty head—
idea he never had—and try on that small body,
one he didn’t make. You will be born too soon.
Overdue, you will gather your own new nakedness.
You will stare into your own huge eyes
and take a milkless milk from yourself, two
suns will rise over the earth of your own breast.
You will laugh at your perfect toes, such tiny peas,
pretend to gobble them before you stand,
try them out, take your first wobbled step,
catch yourself, straighten up, release.
2016
with thanks to Ocean Vuong for the title
Cold Storage
Store your hearts in the cellar
Packed in cool, damp sand. Don’t worry.
They’ll last. Grow dozens with an ancient sun.
You can’t eat your hearts out all at once.
Let frost kiss their shoulders every fall
Before you pull them. Leave the clinging dirt.
Eat the nicked and bruised ones first
Lest they spoil the rest with rot.
Work your way through the toughened stash
Smallest to largest by each winter’s end,
Compost whatever withered ones are left,
Except for the hearts you’ve saved, still firm,
For cancer’s next off-season call,
Small lungs drowned in meconium tar,
Beloved lost in plots of self–harvest,
Your father’s final disregard: death.
2016
Learning to Spin
for Tammy
No one who loves her, who enters
a room where she sits, can tell her no.
She will teach you how to spin.
Here is the Turkish drop spindle.
Here is the antique wheel.
“Do not be afraid,” she says, holds out
her daughter’s first skein. “Everyone
hates their first attempts,” she grins,
“but they are the best, so sweetly uneven.”
“Yes,” I say, “Imperfectly perfect—wabi sabi.”
Sitting with her, best friend of my girlhood,
our bond unscathed by years or roads or men,
we are suddenly ancient women, a lineage,
drawing out soft fibers with our fingers,
grieving teenage children living out of reach.
Such wool so easy to pull apart when loose,
so strong when stretched and spun,
unbreakable, the two of us make mother yarn,
spool it onto arms of whorls, one under,
two over, giddy, grateful for the art of plying.
2016