poems by rachel kellum
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Photographs of Dogs
a day exploring the rabbit warren
twenty-five years of digital files
mined for decades from antique technology
boxy desktops, floppy disks, hard disks
laptops, CDs, thumb drives and now
this hard drive—a terabyte to hold
my life for my children and theirs when I’m gone
a ridiculous search today for the face
of the first dog of my motherhood
Mojo, border collie/black Lab mix
and the second, Leo, my son’s first love
an Aussie mix, both animals ashes now
and the third, Hank, a heeler/Kelpie mix
from Antonito, lining this empty nest with fur
a holy trinity of dogs whose faces
I will digitally carve, tongues in or out, smiling
or serious, collared or wild as dogs are
and send them to China where some underpaid
overworked mother will transfer
three canine faces to fabric, cut and sew
them into silly polyester pajamas
I will wear this winter, thinking of children
long grown who sometimes think of me
whose thousands of digital photos fold
into dogs’, reminder of the attention I gave
the beauty I saw, preserved for a day like this
when my memories have faded into presence
and every evolving pixel and video says
see that: you did it, day after day, witness
slow growth with love. Everything was always
there, the pattern expanding, dogs’ silent witness
a silken comfort to feed, three dogs who fed me
clicking down dark streets, eyes gazing into mine
on couches when the children would watch tv
or forget my existence in exhausted sleep
On the Way to Judith’s Soul Collage Workshop, or How I First Met Katherine and Nathan
I was lost.
The man and woman crouching
on the road ahead were lost.
Is this it? I asked.
It’s not here, they answered,
waving to the cluttered lot.
That is when I saw the bird
between them—
magpie plucking brown stones
from gravel,
clacking each rock loosely
in its beak like a rattle
over a cheerful warble rising
deep in the blue-black throat,
walking back and forth,
welcoming their touch.
Oh, their reborn faces!
First it landed on my head,
the woman said, now this.
What we sought—surpassed
by what we found.
The myth
flew off, a pebble in its mouth.
Drive-By Fairytales
Once upon a time after a rain, a young woman walked
the reeking sidewalk of a college town fueled by soybean industry.
A car driven by a man veered into the oily puddle in the gutter
between him and the girl and drenched her, white shirt
grey and clinging, dark curls dripping, shocked mouth a hole
hands out spread, shaking off drops from eyelashes and finger tips
like tiny prismatic knives. She walked the blocks back to her dorm,
stretching her blouse off her goose pimpled chest, wondering why.
Next week, next year, next life, riding her red bike like a mare
mane flying, another car, this one full of laughing high school boys
veered so close that one could lean out, long arm swinging
and smack her bottom planted on the small hard saddle
of her trusty ten-speed. It was then she stopped wondering.
She woke from a long sleep, as if from a spindle prick
as if from an uninvited kiss, as if from her mother’s future whisper
clawing through the earth of sixty years before the buried words
could reach her daughters’ ears. That ancient tale, gleaned
from nameless wives, scrubbed clean by brothers: her father
the king, was never more than a frog in the back seat of a car
on a first date with a lovely, naïve girl who told him no, no, no
and nine months later, muted by marriage, handed him a son—
and later, three daughters, and later, a decree of infidelity
he denied and flipped, despite his dukes’ discreet testimonies.
Later still, as the youngest daughter lay dying, golden curls
long fallen, their father, who never saw a car he didn’t covet
made a one-way flight to her side to ask if she’d bequeath
her red Ford to his youngest son, the seventh child, the favored one.
“No,” she sweetly seethed. He left before her last breath
to attend his new queen whose hardened brood love to say
none of this is true: a sullen stepchild’s sooty fairy tale.
They ride for the brand, his heirs. She tells this story anyway
her tongue a wheel of wooly thread, her finger black
with ash from a fire long dead they never had to tend.
with thanks to Amy Irish for her workshop,
“Rewriting Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends for Modern Survival”
and Maddie Crum’s “Unhappily Ever After: How Women
Post-Modern Prosperity Gospel of Our Bourgeois God
“Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.” Genesis 1:26
“In a word, [the bourgeoisie] creates a world after its own image.” The Communist Manifesto
Algorithms
Work like we wish
God would
Read our minds
Our Siri whines
Conversations mic’d
Digital prayers
Into the cloud
Into the cart
Where God
Fills
Our scrolling hearts
Delivers all manner
Of goods
Services
Words of wisdom
Curated answers
Biases eternally confirmed
Self-loathing
Anything lilies of the field
Can afford
South Crestone Creek Cold Plunge
The dog fidgets and yawns
nervously as we undress at pool’s edge.
He hovers near, shrinks the circle of his wander
to the pool, that small circumference
that will swallow us to shoulders, trembling.
He who only steps into the stream with four fur feet
to lap up bites of water like a god, can’t comprehend
why we evolved to bare skin, crave cold water,
the runoff of peaks that whiten when it rains.
46 degrees, the laser thermometer reads.
We groan with the pleasure of impending suffering.
Step in, submerge fast without hesitation
as my daughter taught, our familiar breathy gasps
stripped of sex to serve survival. The mouth
of the pool pours in just beyond my lover’s shoulder.
I take in the animal of his mouth—quivering, open,
pulling air through chattering teeth and lips
stretched back in grimace, face tight, panicked
pupils, and calm myself before he does, before
we slip into an inner space that makes room
for existential threat and braces the brave body.
The dog whimpers on pool’s edge, looming protector
over shoulders, senses our mortality, eyes
darting with fear while our skin numbs and burns,
hearts slow, words reduce to syllables and skip
like silent light over the surface. For a moment
I consider my cells sloughing, our commingled cells,
riding this icy water into the great sea beneath
the desert out there, microscopic offerings to a watershed
that will feed no rivers any time soon or ever.
Along the Creek: Land Art in a Time of War
Dazzled by golden canopy,
chance upon a snake on the trail.
Gasp Oh!, jump up, then over it.
Stomp its skull
or marvel how fast it disappears
into rust red needles, leaves
in sand no undulating line behind.
Tear up the duff and grab its tail and spin
or walk into a mitigated clearing, gasp Oh!
as you behold thick bark strips of cottonwood
swirled into a human-sized cone.
Climb it, chuck chunks at birds, set it afire
or dub it chocolate kiss, onion dome,
and quickly know the artist’s hands
are just the same as winds in grasses
piling useless, boring things, let’s go
or singing waters weaving sticks for trout
to stop them in their flow, just to hear
the trout gasp Oh! and rest in shadow.
with thanks to Eric Raanan Fischman,
Allison Wonderland and Leslie Henslee
Crestone Poetry Festival
Crestone Poemfest 6.0, our first in-person fest since Covid hit, was an incredible comeback lovefest of intergenerational rural and urban poets from across Colorado, New Mexico and the Navajo Nation. We brought in water from all directions, in hexagonal formation.
It’s been only five days since everyone dispersed. I still haven’t caught up on my sleep, already jonesing for more creative exhaustion with the poetribe.
We cheered for child-poets, birthed an exquisite corpse, bonded over botanical elixirs and scrumptious curries. We composted jazz and poetry with SETH and the Word Mechanics at T-Road Brewery. We soul-collaged, paraded and bathed in eclipse light casting crescent shaped shadows through our fingers, hair and wicker chairs. We wrote rambling Renga and fairy tales of narrowly escaped disasters. We harvested permaculture-principled poetry from Atwoodian bread and played poetry games in the magic circles of Fluxus instructions.
We brought our favorite books to the deserted island, wandered queerly along a creek dressed in gold and sage-woven tumbleweeds and spiraled bark. We hand bound books, reimagined word-nature and danced in quantum-entangled playgrounds of mycopoetry. We ate balsamic beet poems for lunch, put people first, poetry second, and found poems everywhere anyway.
We grooved with, jarred against, jam band Black Market Translation’s joyful Punketry accompaniment, unstopped our ears with righteous fire of the Beyond Academia Free Skool of Poetry, roared with Talking Gourds elder Art Goodtimes whose bellowing mantra NO… MORE… KINGDOMS! LET… THERE… BE KINDOMS! still whisper-shouts in my mind stream while I teach valley kids how to hand-build clay pumpkins, alliterate, or stop-motion-animate charcoal drawings of women emerging from tree roots.
That final morning, we nibbled scones and jazzed grief. We crossed out our names and scribbled love notes in margins. We passed the gourd, we passed the gourd, we passed the gourd. It spiraled outward.
I’m not sure how poets save the world, but they save me—trying, re-wiring, de-commodifying—one poem at a time.
Long live the Crestone Poetry Festival.
Outside the Path of Totality
I never knew my hands were cameras,
Their tiny spaces human pinholes
Of Renaissance technology,
Projecting what is upside down
To trace the world’s lines.
Unable to look up,
I filter bitten sun through fingers.
How did we get here? This point
Where men no longer fear
Gods will steal the day forever for our hate,
Marching through streets with torches,
Effigies of burning crosses, effigies
Of black bodies flaming in leaves.
Even the leaves of lynch trees
Become apertures.
How dare you strive to turn the oak
Against the sun?
Countless crescent suns
Shimmer in astonishing shadows at our feet.
Black feet of the man I love—
Warped with work and callouses,
Black feet I have rubbed with oil,
Touched with lips, toenails like moons,
Their clippings, eclipsed suns—
Walk this earth.
That day in a pause at work,
He took a photo of tree shadows
To give me all the smiling suns,
Sent it through air to me
Taking the same picture to send to him
In the pause of my own day,
Nudging students to care, to see,
To say something.
How dare you strive to turn the trees
Against this love?
We cannot be obscured.
Our eyes are moons and suns at once.
Arms wrap around each other’s sore backs,
Black hands warm on white skin,
White hands warm on black,
Who is eclipsing whom? No one.
We are love, unstoppable phenomena.
One student called it awesome and awful.
We have no control of it. Heatless light.
Another called it midday dusk and dawn.
Take off your cardboard glasses.
Drop your eyes to earth.
Bless light filtering trees.
Look through your own hands
And weep.
After the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, and the following total solar eclipse