poems by rachel kellum
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How to Grow Carrots, Onions and Garlic Without Lifting a Finger
Promise yourself to dig up the rest come fall.
Procrastinate before first frost.
Blame your job.
Forget until snow falls.
Ignore regret’s negative self-talk.
Touch their mushy shoulders come spring.
Witness what you thought was dead sprout green.
2017
Four years I have lived
My words are hiding in his body.
Perhaps I am the culprit.
Self-saboteur who hid them there.
Home alone no poems come.
I wait in long space. He walks in at dusk
in canvas clothes, the poem I didn’t write,
with huge thighs, silk arms,
towering white smile like moonshine,
torso warm locomotive stillness.
I hold my breath a moment like kids
passing through a mountain tunnel.
He moves through me. I can’t say why
I was made for this, why I mourn
no muse. Four years I have lived
with a man who doesn’t know
he is my favorite poem.
2017
Omission Sonnet
After the lovemaking, after his voice softens
in apology, it is likely best to steer clear
of parsing small omissions that often
mean no more than there are bigger things here
than fretting over who has kept a pocket-
sized fib to oneself. No need to get hysterical,
but one small stab of why soon needs a tourniquet.
Bleeding through the kitchen, playing oracle,
I ask myself, what does omission mean? What
did I do to make him feel he’d need a priest
to seek forgiveness? My worst fear: he’s cut
me from his wary ex’s cloth, the woman I am least
like in my book. I black her off of pages on his shelf,
afraid, by reading her, I wrote her on myself.
2015, 2017
A Question for Merrill Kellum
The morning after you sold the farm,
Did you wake early to milk the cows,
And, remembering, simply stand in the dew
In your button up gold sweater
And brown fedora tipped just so
To watch the yellow creep up the oak
In your new neighborhood?
I can hardly believe the only time
I remember of you is the many years
Of your retirement in Meredosia,
Hands on your hips to study sky
And cocklebur fields where we kids
Would play king of the mountain
On construction dirt piles, pushing.
You would puff your cherry tobacco pipe
On the small concrete patio
Behind your house, announce if the world
Smelled like rain on the way, as if that
Knowledge were all that remained
Of your dairy days. It was enough to plant
A slow seed in me, plucking burs from my socks.
2017
In Her Dominion
Hecate crisscrosses
Milky deserts
Of wrinkled mythos,
Humus crumbles
From her shoes.
Ancient archivist,
She plucks a whisker
From her chin to write
The rascally world.
2017
Ekphrasis on a Lost Image
Two flowers.
Two birds.
Two women.
Two flying squirrels.
One man.
He makes his maps,
Translates hope for legs
Into one black wing.
The counted and named
Look away,
Avoid his gaze.
Too late—
He has already made
Himself a feathered God,
And the world: a woman full
Of twins
Who will destroy him.
2017
Never Not in the Middle
On little couch, I’m tight between
my youngest son and Love.
There’s the obvious:
Earth and sun.
I’ve been between a cabin
And Salida twenty years.
Wandering a sagebrush dream
Between abstract and concrete.
Incision and Death.
Prairie fog, white Leadville breath.
Mope and door.
Silence and the ringing ear.
Empty freezer,
Black boar.
Speckled hen,
running cow.
Now.
2017
Marriages
1
I dreamt the white dress standing in front of a mirror
With my perfect man who would soon read the letter
I wrote him when I was 16 in Young Women’s class
At church in which I promised purity and to be
Temple worthy. We would learn our real names.
The mirror behind us would reflect the mirror before us,
Our faces would recede into infinity. We would learn
The secrets of godhood together. Populate worlds.
2
Pregnant, I wore a dusty rose dress on a mountain
His mother almost died climbing. He slid the ring
Jagged with peaks on my finger, said, “With this ring
I hold you forever.” Terrified at such solidity, I replied,
With Zuni water ring, “Please wear this token
Of my love, constant and changing as the ocean.”
One morning, a year later, I woke and the tide
Had gone too far out. I left him on land.
3
We wore only our hair and braided two long strands
Of it together, cut with a knife under the tree
Where our son was born the year before.
We put the braid in a leather bag with our children’s
Fingernails, my milk, a raven claw. Love medicine.
Inexorable drift. When he moved out, he took the knife
From the wall. I packed the family medicine in boxes,
Puzzled that something had eaten our feathers.
4
No dress. No mirrors.
No mountain. No rings.
No braid. No tree.
Just chickens. Garden.
Bees. Rolling plains.
Tiny house. Pond singing spring.
Sleepless reach. Wordless gaze.
2017