poems by rachel kellum
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Furniture of the Dead
This morning after waking, I bathed my sour hair
and dressed in cotton woven by machines. Drifted
to the living room with couches snagged and draped
with children’s old bedsheets and books: protection
for cushions from cat claws while we sleep.
I could be a ghost waking up months dead, wandering
the family mansion full of dusty furniture, suspended—
freeze-tagged kids in Granny’s thin whites on Halloween,
no holes for eyes. But today I am alive. Not dead.
I undress the couch, the chair, to live in my house,
drink tea, watch light crawl across cobwebbed walls
and leaning plants, browning bananas in a bowl.
Today I sigh to sit by this tar-stained, stained-glass lamp,
the one by which I used to read in Laurie’s basement
to be near her—cooly smoking. The lamp holds on like grief
to potential light, the way I do, anticipating night, when
I can pull this chain and that, ignite its double bulbs,
glowing like my friend’s clear eyes through twisting smoke.
My Sister’s Arm
As little girls
and teens, it was
our favorite sister trick
to trade skin,
so simple to sit
on the sofa,
open my right hand
palm-up on her lap,
her left hand open
palm-up on mine,
arms crossed
in the X of a kiss,
of a chromosome,
the tip of my left finger
perched on her wrist,
her right fingertip
perched on mine.
Eyes closed,
synchronized so as not
to break the spell,
we would slide
our touch slowly, slowly
toward the tender
inner elbow of the other
and back to the wrist
when it would happen:
the eerie sensation
my sister’s arm was mine,
her finger now my finger
stroking my own arm
back and forth,
until we could no longer
bear the awful squirm,
the skin-crawling
truth, that future lie:
we are one—
my arm buried with her
in the mud
when she died,
her arm here
begging for touch
as I type.
I Know How Old Women Love
Gramps’ teeth in a cup
on the sink of my youth: perfect toothed smile
now in my own love’s mouth
Elegy for LVJ
When Ultra-Violet died,
her house plants,
silent green friends
for decades—
fern, heartleaf,
giant jade—died too.
Her kitchen radio
played classic rock
in the dark
for weeks, looking
antique but new,
seeking her ear.
Old cigarette ash lay
in a faceted glass tray
like faded buffalo,
like fingers mourning
the letters of her
nearby keyboard.
in memory of Laurie Violet James
The Work of Small Birds
Juncos and Nuthatches wait for Magpies to stop
pecking the suet basket, clean up crumbs
they drop. Chickadees wait too. On winter break,
I wait for my husband to return from work
after doing my own work grading journals.
Work: that giant, voracious, black and white bird,
shoulders blue-sheened with empty praise
of nobility to replace adequate compensation,
that racket scaring off the timid beaks in our chests
longing for anything new to do in this small town
beyond observing birds, walking the dog, witnessing
a shawl of cloud slip over silent mountains, binging
the lives of fictional characters from a coach seat,
that sedentary train of working-class, world travel,
our basket robbed of opportunity, something
greasy, something seedy to feed our small hours.
A Gift
Beneath a simple, lit tree on a wide couch
flanked by dogs, I sleep in the home
of my grown sons and their father.
In the dark morning, after he starts
his car now brushed of fresh snow,
waiting to carry him over icy roads
to the shop basement where he tunes skis—
the old way, he assures guests, in the lineage
of his father, born of mountains—my baby,
twenty now, hands me a crinkly package
wrapped in last year’s salvaged snowmen print.
Both of us smile in anticipation. Tugging
at tape, I unfold the seam to reveal
the indigo coat he bought me for the hill
where our family once refound itself, healed,
whole. We revel in it, this moment a son
first clothes his mother against a chill,
one still within his nascent, gracious control.
Carpenter Hands
Hand in hand, resting
near the fire and in between
the comings and goings,
I trace his rough, stiff fingers
with my own papery ones, study
salty palm lines like pine rings,
circle the swollen splinter inside
his palm like a hopeful seed,
as if dropped by an ancient tree
in the dark wood of him
to become him if it could. Fingers—
once broken, now bent-healed twigs
of knotted knuckles and raspy,
calloused tips— surge buds,
strange blooms: whole homes,
warm rooms, sunny domes,
my skin. A burgeoning.