poems by rachel kellum
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We Were Little Girls
for Tammy, Talia and Sage
We were little girls without breasts or hips.
Your skin light brown, mine bilirubin white.
You on a ten speed, me a dirt bike.
Five boys surrounded the building site.
It had been raining a long time. There was mud.
Rich honeybrown Illinois mud.
We stepped in gingerly, until –our thrill!—
we were up to our knees in liquid earth.
We wrestled there like girls, best friends,
not to hurt or dominate or pose for boys,
but for the fact of mud slick on our skin,
matting our hair, staining our terry cloth clothes.
I don’t recall the tactical wrestling
as much as the practical joy, Tammy,
the daring doing of something girls don’t do,
and the awe of boys who did not join us.
We walked home caked and proud as the sun sank low
to your little white house with red brick façade,
set up on a steep lot we used roll down like logs
despite itchy chiggers. We rang the doorbell,
grinning. “Hi, Mom!” we chimed loud.
Your mother’s blue eyes were huge and mock serious.
“Not in my house! Out back! Garden hose! Now!”
Remember? Squealing, we poured cold ropes of water
across the muddy continents of our girlhood,
brown rivers tracing the valleys of our knees,
flooding the plains of our hopeful chests and sloping bellies,
skinny arms and legs raising hair like new trees,
raising up the brazen women we would later be,
quaking in the half light of a late September.
2013
Three Bodies in Six Realms Collage, 2013
Three Bodies in Six Realms, Collage, 2013
Some friends once gave me 30 years worth of National Geographic magazines. A couple years ago, I finally put a few of them to use. This is my first attempt at old fashioned collage using an Xacto knife and glue.
Tiny Birds
Beaks buried in nectar,
Bodies buddhas,
Wings blur.
We study throats,
Rusty bellies
In books, windows.
My grandmother’s words
Were once full
Of hummingbirds.
Last night, every time
We kissed, one
Burned inside my dark mind.
When the feeder tips,
The tiny bird
Moves with it.
2013
Mistaken Metaphors at Close Range
Some ancestor of the pyramids
Landed on Plymouth Rock
And started making bricks
To throw from a ladder
In the wide bearded sky,
Mistaking metaphor, boarding doors.
Fast forward: pawns knee deep
In ocean foam wring their velvet
Coats upon the shore. Kites grieve.
Revolver barrels gleam, growing
Boys evolve machine gun clarity
On screens. Televisions drown.
This is our Eight of Swords warning.
Beg your daughters, teach your sons:
Scribble golden pentacles on your arms!
2013
in response to Mark Kreger’s art exhibit, At Close Range
The Bardo of the Sea
I’ve been knee deep
In the sea from the moment
I gave up duality.
TVs don’t reach me.
My red boat is always just
Within reach.
Darling, I bring you
A white package.
It is empty.
When you unwrap
The bow, it will be like pouring
Water into water.
We fill it with flaming
Tumbleweeds, open-eyed kisses,
Our own make-believe distance.
Oh, knee deep blisses!
Deep ignorances!
Let’s dive.
2013
in response to Mark Kreger’s painting, The Crossing
What is Left
The piano (I bought
with the money left me
by my sister who left
the world eyes open
in her own guest bed
where our mother slept)
out in the abandoned
dairy barn, for which
there is no room
in this small
warm house,
and the stacks
of monochromatic
oil paintings of men’s
and women’s bodies
that were always only
ever mine, but for whom
there is a lack of walls,
will not withstand
the cracking cold,
the thaw.
2013
Metaphors
We could say the planet is a head,
Its nose the Atlantic,
The corners of its mouth
The tips of puzzled continents,
Its eyes the U.S. and Middle East,
If eyes were power,
If power were crude.
But darlings, the globe is no head.
What metaphor are we,
With 15 billion eyes and ears,
Wombs doubling life
Into gloved and unwashed hands,
Spilling what’s left
Into blind hospital buckets,
Deaf dirt floors.
What metaphor?
Perhaps instead the earth
Is a metaphor for us—
Ancient, once whole,
Always drifting,
A war of currents,
Frozen in our furthest reaches.
I would give up this globe
If I could.
When I wake up,
My eyes are no seas,
My voice is no America,
My skin is no Scotland,
My womb is no Switzerland,
My heart is no Ireland,
My hands are no Germany,
My name is no Wales.
Poems cannot hold me.
I am content to stand—
Unsure of land and words—
And walk across the room to you
Who are no Africa, no Omaha, no Mississippi,
But space wrapped in a man.
They’ll say you are a metaphor for me;
I am a metaphor for you.
2013
The Treachery of Neighbors
We watch from behind
The wire that burns.
Have worried
The proper distance
From their box in the grass,
Its swinging doors.
Sometimes the windows laugh.
The curly cow
Throws cobs we ignore,
Comes and goes;
Glances linger
Over her shoulder.
Every dawn she disappears,
A silver breath cut through pasture,
Returns with many bags.
She chews
A grassy language.
Sometimes moos.
The big bull
And their calves moo, too.
This would be confusing
But for the vacant
Stillness in their eyes.
That we recognize.
Alone, each studies us
And breathes.
They rarely stop
In twos and threes.
How eerie
We never see them eat.
2013