poems by rachel kellum
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Buddha Woman Speaks and Surrenders, Again
Oh, it is you again
standing here within me,
dancing the darkest moon of my dish
washing, gnawing my hipped belly bowl
promising blood.
You tango through the terror
of my uninhabited dreams, rip
the seams of me where these
clothes don’t fit, haven’t fit
for years of moons at many sinks.
I try not to think about it, but you,
Blood Woman, you needle
to keep me true to who
I think I am, or wanted to be,
but I am always changing, see?
We never agree. You say throw the plates!
I say make them gleam.
I am tired of our existential arguing.
Of cutting myself in pieces for your uses:
Mother, writer, sister, teacher, lover, painter, blue.
You are ruthless, refuse to let me lose these faces.
If only we could multiply our tongue by two!
If only they could flap at once,
in absolute and relative bliss,
Laughing: this/not this! this/not this!
But you won’t have it.
You insist: this, this, this!
I can’t resist. I drop a dish.
2008
featured in Slow Trains, 2008
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
slow hold
the gentle
plains of your body lay
unconstrained by seams
beneath slow palms. slow
as they could go.
eyes I knew, even
in shadow: your mother’s
blue kindness. (was she
also a sharer of spinach
and rice?) silver
caravan, Cache La Poudre
could not contain the crash
of us, or our condensation,
clouds born of pulsing
breath and skin blushing
windows. finally, out in
the air, Hold raised her head.
Owl asked questions. we smiled
inches from the beds of
our lips, faces reflecting
suns of bare teeth
hiding tongues.
2008-20012
magic for inducing labor
open every cabinet, door
all your precious boxes
kiss the jewels inside their bellies
treasure trunks, unlock them
oil every squeaky drawer
windows, open yawning
overfill your tea cups, bowls
spill them into earthen hollows
belly’s fleshy gate will follow
listen for the ancient knocking
2008/2012
Four colleagues
Spanish, Art,
English and Speech,
stood in a square clasping hands,
crisscrossing embraces,
celebrating the settling of Speech’s
long-coming, limb-lopping,
soul-stalking litigation: erased,
magically disintegrated, swallowed
by the void of the day’s new moon.
The science was easy to explain.
No one missed a beat: Yes, of course,
of course, removed by the waning moon!
Even the trees, mused English,
Even the trees come to mean.
Her peach tree, damaged by storm,
blown down years and years ago,
before her own near death collapse,
five years ago began to grow,
resurrected, new, sprouting two
upraised limbs and this year sunrise globes,
praising the sky for health, she said,
My Life! That tree is my life!
Art added: and two thighs…
Speech finished: giving birth…
And Spanish beamed: to five years of doctoral work!
A Roman numeral five! and a V for victory!
Their nonsense raised up gooseflesh,
made tired eyes gleam, passed
light to light on the high dry plains,
where squares aren’t meant to shine
and spin wild whirling spheres of
hope and living poetry, but do.
2008
Though he has a replacement
He is still playing the guitar.
The thinnest string broke
Two days ago. Low tunes
Thread slow through
My hands forgetting
Words, and silence
Sings the sixth
String in me.
2008/2011
lunch poem
Liberate me from the screen
fluorescent dream of office living.
Take their eyes off me
as I eat or try to fall asleep
reliving the eloquence and
stumbling, sometimes stunned
speech teaching wrenches from me—
they do not know how deep.
Show me how to eat this bamboo shoot
with more than teeth and speed.
Hold my hand and point.
Help me see the poem in my fortune
cookie: All personal breakthroughs
begin with a change in beliefs.
2008
two haiku for birds
rain from the gutter
sings through night’s open windows
sparrows miss the sun
wrens wait for clear light
inside wet cottonwood trees
the whole town sings, come!
2008
we trade one kind of happiness for another
This:
Your husband making sweet and sour chicken,
taking the children fishing or doing laundry while you read
to them of conches, of a Hindu prince who runs, while a raven eats away
your heart, pecking for missing pomegranate seeds,
finding only poems. He blinks. You blink. He flies away. You turn
from your husband’s touch. It is too much, or not enough.
The shared smile over children may be, but you and he
don’t fly touching wings despite trying.
For this:
Your husband flown the nest. Your heart a full fruit in four hands, burst,
staining walls with blood thrown stars every morning, every time you
crack it between thumbs from whom poems have temporarily fled
into folded laundry’s lights, darks and reds, into tired Illinois menus
of pork pot roast, potatoes, frozen pizzas and children (hold them
tighter) punching to grab your eyes bedazzled by sunrise over skin,
by a Hindu prince who runs and returns, runs and returns,
and a raven who no longer blinks and burns.
2008