poems by rachel kellum
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Mother Dharma
A child is a slow
moving thought
you watch.
Its departing birth
a new entrance,
subtle, inching back
into into into you.
You surrender
your eyes, let it
commandeer hands,
arms and legs,
eat your heart,
guts and brain,
become your bones,
your size, watch it
dissolve into a dazzling
dangerous world,
into its own child.
Helpless, welcome
it like sky burial:
child into child
into child burial.
Embrace the lineage
of generous forgetting,
your liberation.
Midnight Transmission Promo
Enjoy this new late night reading series hosted by Diné Nation poets Jesse T. Maloney and Orlando White, transmitting the Word from the Rez. It was an unforgettable experience for me--an honor to read with such powerful women and be buoyed up by that smart, gentle audience in the digital realm. Jesse and Orlando are everything you want in a host: gracious, kind, humble and humorous AF. Clips from the evening will be posted soon.
The crumble on the muffin was connecting with an audience member who is the daughter of my most beloved college mentor, Dr. Joellen Jacobs, the woman who, nearly thirty years ago, walked me into the house of poetry, holding my hand through every image and cadence of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and, later, Stevens' "The Snow Man." I found a home. The sonic, imagistic and philosophical joy I experienced in these two poems have guided my aesthetic choices for decades.
I hate to say it, but what a trip when it's true: it's a small, small world.
D-Con
We found his box of green pellets, stuffed
the poison in our cheeks, carried it away
to a high place out of reach of the children:
a plastic bag of pillows dangling from a top bunk.
We tried not to swallow en route, leapt the chasm,
made a dozen deadly deposits in the pillows,
hoped against hope the toxic dust would not
dry us up, turn our blood against our own hearts.
In the meantime, in the daily hurried rituals
of scurry, gather and hide, barely sleeping,
we forgot where we tucked away our riches.
When it snowed, a woman found our pine nuts
in her snow boot. When she spilled her coffee,
grass seeds cached in towels high on a shelf
spilled out like confetti into her mouth. The next day,
stuck to threads of a cotton nest chewed into a mattress
pad stored under the bed, she found our mother
a brown, dried horror husk, mealworms long dead
in the small bowl of her skull, the ribs of her chest.
circa Trump’s defeat
Grocery Store Orchid
I’d never buy one.
It was a gift from a woman
who believes in me.
Quite soon
the stalk yellowed,
flowers drooped and fell.
The orchid, my orchid,
spends most of its life
as leaves, teaches
under water me
by spilling over, dying off,
teaches wait for me
and time, as always,
is beauty’s only currency.
The Old Phones
The old phones were family pets,
shared, oily, of heft, a comfort,
yet also retractable weapons
you could chuck at your sister,
black her eye and reel in
like a slick catfish. Yes, they were
small, warm bodies or, at least, body parts,
you could innocently fondle, a young cat
cradled against your neck with spiral tail
you could wrap around yourself
a dozen times, a DNA boa, a fetus
whose umbilical cord could stretch
across the kitchen, down the stairs,
through the hall, pulse invisibly under
your door where you could wait forever
on the floor for that boy to say something
into the dark shell of your ear floating
inside the flowered womb of your plush
carpeted bedroom. You could listen
to his busy signal, the silence inside
his steady breathing, all heart
beats. You could hear the voice
of your mother in the distance,
humming receive, receive, receive.
handbuilding us
love scores me / slips me
sticks me / smooths me
to you before we / grow leather hard
carves its / name into this
body we’ve become / fragile greenware
handed into fire / one earthen vessel
we hope for no fissures / we hope to hold
whatever we must / water wine blood
even cracked / a bowl can hold
almonds pencils / seedling coins dust
your heart an opus
three dimensional muscle
sculpture in your chest, yes, baby,
she said, we forget
with thanks to Wendy Videlock
Sutra for Letting Go of Aversion
You carry it in your pocket,
the great joiner and divider.
You carry it; it is not a shackle.
Shiny, flat world you unlock
with holy number to access
poems, gallery, mailbox,
camera, classroom, memory,
algorithmic Ouroboros news
feeding you you, yes, you:
your sudden mysteries and blue
morning dread, headlined
heart palpitations custom
collected For You by algorithm
that can’t comprehend truth,
only what the data knows you
demand: to feel furious, righteous,
ignited by the state, the smokey world.
You want more and more to be
satirically amused, rope-a-doped
with hope. You want to flick through
the bottomless scroll, dive,
kick deep for the story, that final
story that will stitch, wrap, drain
every awful wound. Helpless, lonelier
than primordial God, you uninstall
His newest news app. Undressed,
without hope or fear, observe
the busy emptiness. Bathe
in it, remember how you rode it,
your aversion nothing but a board
numbers buff to keep you surfing.
A Boring Movie
Halfway through the night, he’s up for hours for months.
To sleep again, he’ll read, drink tea, perch on the heater.
Earlier, after dinner, we always sit close to watch a show.
Tonight I ask him for a word. Airplane, he mumbles.
This is my new favorite way to surf Netflix, I say.
I search “airplane” and find what you might expect.
Leslie Nielsen. Every kind of flight disaster film. Cartoons.
War planes. History documentaries. Survival stories.
Highjacking heroes. And this run-on-titled gem:
Relaxing White Noise: Airplane Sleep Sounds White Noise -
Jetliner Plane Flight for Sleeping, Relaxation, made,
obviously, for people who trust pilots, mechanics, engineers—
long-legged men who say yes to the emergency exit seat,
not their short-legged wives who read and re-read
the laminated wordless cartoon instruction sheet.
The soundtrack is romantically ideal: pure, airy engine sound
unpunctuated by coughs, crying babes or conversations
between loud flirtatious strangers sharing a row. Visually,
the film loops a CGI of a Relaxing Airways jumbo jet
oaring through a sky of endless wispy popcorn clouds.
Fluidly panning, we see the plane from above, the side,
float over the wing, linger on the tail logo, back off,
sink below the wing at a distance, look up at an angle,
follow from behind, pass a yellow sun, catch a glinting sea,
rise to birds’ eye once more, shift slowly down to the nose,
pan windows along the length to the tail, land again
on the logo of a sleeping woman’s head on a pillow.
And so on and so forth for an hour and fifty-nine minutes.
Fifty in, he wakes. What are we watching, he asks.
White noise, I say. Uh, he says, and sleeps. I type.
The plane flies in one direction. I am moving around it.
Or, I am still and the plane is turning slowly, showing off.
I look up from time to time, learn by heart the order of the loop.
He sleeps. Really this is not a bird’s but a god’s eye view.
When I am in the sky, I never imagine the possibility
someone, somewhere, could be watching the machine
from above, the vessel in which I am so small, a face
in a window, confined to unfeathered body and two eyes,
photographing clouds below. The wing is slightly in the way.
I crop the shots to hide my helpless state. Memorizing
light on cirrus, finally relaxing my grip on him, I do not sleep.