poems by rachel kellum

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2014, My Work in Other Venues 2014, My Work in Other Venues

NFSPS Poetry Awards

The National Federation of State Poetry Societies has announced the winners of its 2014 contests. I am pleased to learn that three of my poems were honored:


The Margo Award:"Tiny Birds," third place (out of 167 entries), forthcoming in the 2014 anthology, Encore.
NFSPS Founders Award:"And We Will Bloom," 3rd Honorable Mention (out of 363 entries)
Peace Award:"Practicing English with Geshe-la," 2nd Honorable Mention (out of 138 entries)

A complete list of all winners can be found here.

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2013, My Work in Other Venues 2013, My Work in Other Venues

KDNK Carbondale Radio Features Poets
of the Karen Chamberlain Poetry Festival

A posse of poets—Eric Walter, accompanied on guitar by his gifted son, Jacob, Stewart Warren and I—joined Kim Nuzzo of the Aspen Poets Society on KDNK to promote the third annual Karen Chamberlain Poetry Festival at the Thunder River Theatre. What a great time we had sharing our poems and putting out the good word!

To listen to the show, check out Poets March 29, 2013.

While I’m at it, here is a sweet review of the festival worth checking out by Art Goodtimes.

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2008, My Work in Other Venues Rachel Kellum 2008, My Work in Other Venues Rachel Kellum

because iphones are poems, and i held yours

i want to slide my thumbs
across the screen of you, outward, opening
and opening into hidden windows, rolling
vistas and whispered songs where secret codes linger:
username: hauntingly_familiar@crestone.com
password: hello_ my god
intuitively, i would go.
in one window there would be space
for us to sing and spread
hot sauce across the lips
of countless tacos, abolishing hunger.
in another: the crimson heart of desert fields
with no roads and a waning gibbous morning
moon promising more than future fullness.
i would glide into and through the
labyrinthine libraries of your mind,
run my fingers down electric spine upon spine,
and never tire, invite you into mine,
already you’ve found the door in,
my margins awaiting your eyes.
click shrine and find adorned dakini breasts,
bejeweled beneath thangkas
of majestic blue cocks
dancing in flame, blaming no one
for too much attachment, allowing longing.
further in: a room of beds with singing springs
no one would hear but us, springs shrieking,
screaming wild with our choked breath
and shocked eyes and golden light beaming
shooting, streaming from pores, and more.
more, there would be more places
than we can fathom from this place
where massive indifferent thumbs
of circumstance slide inward
and inward across you, across me, across
a bench by a moonlit stupa, receding,
receding, the print too small to read,
my thumbs too small to reach the screen,
farther away than my hips can comprehend
circumambulating the memory of your hands,
turning and turning toward you, this heart
looking for your gentle thumbs,
but the sky, abundantly prudent,
has swallowed you whole.

2008

featured in Slow Trains, 2008

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2012, My Work in Other Venues 2012, My Work in Other Venues

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

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2012, My Work in Other Venues 2012, My Work in Other Venues

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

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2012, My Work in Other Venues 2012, My Work in Other Venues

in Lush

Two of my poems, "Reverie in Green" and "If we forget there is work to be done", are now featured in a new book by Rufous Press: Lush.

I'm particularly happy that a few poems by my friend and fellow Coloradoan, Cameron Scott, also live in these pages. Check him out.

“A diverse collection of contemporary poetry and prose from around the globe, Lush is a compact volume of emotive, fluid, and genuine modern day verse. This joyful selection of warm weather meanderings will speak to even the most casual consumer of poetic wordplay.” -A.g. Synclair, Editor & Publisher of The Montucky Review

“Lush is an exquisite collection, brimming with the palatial richness of summer’s luster. Like watching August light reveal the veins in shady leaves, the pieces in Lush remind us that this season of warmth is also meta-palace of memory where the scent of clover can unveil a forgotten moment or shadows on water can stir a desire long hidden within. Once again, Rufous Press has produced a thoughtful and exciting compilation of new voices.” -Megan Duffy, Editor of The Meadowland Review

“The poetry and prose in Lush span an arc of joy--rough and delicate, lasting and immediate.” -Kathleen Maher

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