poems by rachel kellum
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Knee Deep in the Water Somewhere
For Brittany
When your husband has gently
requested a break from the constant stream
of Jimmy Buffet, and you’ve finally
given away all the flamingo flotsam
your family thought you loved—you,
whom they mistook for a beautiful, pink,
strange bird, balanced on one foot
in the front yard of their lives—
and your new, somehow oldest friend,
on a scorching alpine desert trail
that burns beloved dogs’ feet, assures you
after hearing the longing in your voice
for cool sand, your heartsick song for the sea,
that, yes, yes, you must go, go to the beach—
well, then, you must go. Go where the body
wants to go. You cannot lie to the body.
And while her heart breaks to send you out
of this quiet, dark sky valley, with its cacti
and sand dunes, its desperate children
in whom you believed, its blood-red string
of sunset mountains, she knows this place
is not your home, this crusted graveyard
of a once inland sea. “Fly off, sweet friend,”
her heart thrills. “Though, you are no bird.
No net ensnares you. You are a free
human being with an independent will.”
with thanks to Jane Eyre, our first book, for the final lines
Fish Heads
after Raymond Carver
Ted Fish made heads out of clay.
He was known for it, loved.
These heads are all over Salida.
Pinch lipped busts in shop windows.
Bobbing ornaments in dead trees.
One, a skinless, meat-red monolith
sits on a bank among boulders,
casting the line of its low gaze
over the Arkansas, a marker
for boaters to measure depth.
I never knew him except through
others’ grief. He died a few
weeks before I moved there.
On the table. Under the knife.
His heart.
Two heads came into my hands
in round about ways. One
from a new friend, fellow artist
and co-worker, Ben, whose
eyes teared up when he handed
it to me, a porcelain, grimacing,
two-faced thing with a hole
clear through the crown to
the throat, passage for some jute
rope I’ve planned for years to string
with fat, glass beads the color
of Caribbean swells. Maybe
I’ll finally get to it. After a story,
Barbara, poet who refuses
public farewells and left his funeral
early, gave me the other: a black face—
blue edged, sort of grinning—emerging
from white porcelain slab. The whole
thing attached to a small black canvas
with two long copper wire stitches.
I placed it on the piano where sheet
music should perch. The piano
is always out of tune, but my son
plays it anyway. Two nights ago,
on a stop as he was driving through,
the tiny head rang, watery
with my son’s invented song.
When I hugged him hello
and later goodbye, hard, I felt him
tremble, quaking in the core, a dark
face pressing through his body
into mine. In the kitchen, he talked
in low, steady tones, like there
was earth under his feet, said
when he gets back he’s drying out,
going to stop filling the hole
with every dead sailor in the sea.
“You can do it,” I said, “change karma,
consequence.” Which was too much,
another hole. You can do it is all I meant,
but saying less is hard for me. He knows.
“Thank you,” he said, and for a second,
soft eyed, lost himself among crumbs
on the counter. Then raised his head.
Gallery of an Old Woman
This is me at fifty, prying open
my chest with both hands,
mandorla doorway to a cavern
of crumbled yellow Legos.
Watch them fall out. My children
step on them in the dark.
I’m not quite beautiful.
Motherly mustache, single
whisker, necklace of thorns,
I wear my grandmother’s
long dead hummingbirds
like forgotten songs.
On the shelf is a spiral
shell, one my daughter
brought back from Spain.
When I miss her, I hold it
in my palm. Where does
the inside of the spiral end?
Is it one-eyed, eyeless,
this love for my children,
now grown? Where do I look
or swim, my wings,
my webbed feet, full
of hollow bones?
Two monkeys chained
to the window sill of my eyes
ignore the boats. Instead,
I’m lost in clouds—
floating white blood cells
saving me by fading.
with thanks to the following works of art:
Two Monkeys, 1562, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder
Yellow, 2007, by Nathan Sawaya
Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, 1940, by Frida Kahlo
Decoy Study (Duck), 2014, by Maskull Lasserre
Sky Above Clouds III, 1963, by Georgia O’Keeffe
White Shell with Red, 1938, by Georgia O’Keeffe
The Scream
Time's receding bridge
brought us here,
alive, from the bellies
of our dead.
Wide eyed, mouth
open, bald,
you hold your head
like a burnt out bulb.
Give me your hands.
Let’s trade faces,
cradle one another’s chin
while sky screams red.
Blue water below
whispers flow.
We jump in,
swim for distant boats
whose purpose
is unknown.
So what if Google told Netflix I searched Blade Runner trivia in order to finish your elegy?
When I wrote the last line, you know,
the one about electric seeds,
that slant allusion only fellow Dickians
would recognize (my coded love for you
now networked, digitized, available
to you, disembodied brother, loose
electricity), it felt a marvel, like a message
back from you (as we promised, once,
over coffee and cheap smokes, to do,
whoever died first) that ten minutes
after I wrote that line and turned on
the flat screen (no longer synecdochically
only metonymically the tube), Netflix
recommended Blade Runner
as a Top Pick for You.
The coincidence felt so pure. Like you
had pulled strings in the electronic world
to say hello, thank you for the elegy,
thank you for not letting me sink,
obituary-less, into obscurity. Until
it occurred to me, perhaps this is no
message, no spiritual synchronicity,
just a fucking contract between silicon-
licking corporations swindling everybody,
kidnapping kids, herding sheep,
linking algorithms for maximum profit—
assholes making sure whenever I search
for something in one place, I get it in another;
I get it, what I want, and they get me—
my time, my attention: virtual currency.
And then, simultaneous to my inner rant,
I felt, no, heard you burst across space,
you maniacal, mystical mathematician,
you dreaming android, you Dick trickster!
Ba ha ha! you guffawed, Why isn't
the language of math also the language
of soul, of consciousness? I am an algorithm!
Your wireless desire shot through cyberspace
became my voice’s conduit! Of course! This,
your final poetic proverb, enigmatic epigram,
your magnum opus of philosophical jokes:
William Wayne Reed: Algorithm and Asshole.
Under cover of night, I would steal into Riverside
Cemetery, carve it on your headstone, cosmic
old loner, if you have one. I would sprinkle
your unlikely ashes over Dick’s final plot.
I would sing it in alliterative liturgy.
Giggle amen. Goodbye, my loyal friend,
my Gordian tempunaut.
2021
The Big Picture
exquisite corpse
Man Ray, Yves Tanguy,
Joan Miró, Max Morise,
you architects
of exquisite corpse,
bring a woman in,
dream the Siamese kiss.
You four men cannot
deny the yin of orifice,
the phallic sticks
of dynamite, pistols spraying.
Mark it, baby! Come and piss!
State of the art!
Only Miró dropped
the obvious violence—
beneath the body of sex
and death he gave us dust,
creature, appendage,
a lit match, the vague line.
The monster sits
on the back of a man,
dead or simply
fallen with the weight
of his side
of the binary.
Blind to design, men love
to pass sketched paper
hand to hand,
pass land and women
like pieces of folded power.
A game! Art of the state!
Layer by layer they build
upon fragments
of other men’s clues, desire
daring us: unfold this mess,
marvel at our artifice,
our clever disaster.
2017/2018
Post Impression of a Barmaid
Edouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1882
My hands could not decide
how to rest on the bar.
Arms at my sides—aloof, unmoored.
Arms crossed, holding one wrist—on guard.
Fingers interlaced look like teeth.
One hand resting on the other—maybe lazy.
Arms wide, each hand clutching the nearest edge,
wrists out—an open beckoning.
Ready to serve.
Watching the kindly crowd,
something flickered, overlaid.
Somehow I became her, remembered
many years of serving bored, weary students
the image of the barmaid of Folies-Bergère*.
Her stance denies the welling vacant eyes.
Object of the bourgeois gaze, see
how she looks upon us, her patrons?
Ever awaiting the empty whim, our tip,
next to a stemmed dish of tangerines,
Manet’s sign of fille de joie**.
Ever pouring the public what they think
will finally satisfy:
a drink, Degas, degrees, desire.
I can’t be sure if the reflection
behind, leaning toward
the moneyed man, is hers or mine.
The angle wrong, reflected bottles
missing or mismatched with actual ones.
Perhaps there is no mirror at all,
no skewed perspective, or all is skewed.
I face forward looking
for your eyes, quiet in the bright
din of artists everywhere, most retired.
Before me, behind me, up in the corner, there!
A woman’s green slippered feet,
perched bodiless on trapeze!
I don’t need to see her face
to know why she prefers the air.
*Folies-Bergère: FUH-lee Bear-zhare: a famous cabaret music hall, located in Paris, France
**fille de joie: FEE-de zhwa: literally, “girl of joy,” euphemism for sex worker
Intellectual Property
Jean Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Cadmium), 1984, MCA, Denver
SAMO’s copyright
did not protect Basquiat.
ART bought what he stole.
His streetborn soul.
2017
The Dead One
Find the dead one within.
If you are lost enough, you can revive her.
She soon will be your boat
off the island, your dodgy water.
Drink rain from her rotten mouth.
Teach her to talk, to sing
your mother’s favorite songs.
The dead one’s desire: your compass.
Carry her on your back
until she finds your legs.
Teach her how to flirt with love
by playing the unsuspecting girl.
Dress up to make it real.
She will chop your wood,
dance you ‘round and through the fire,
drop you in the river tied together.
Breathe air into the mutual drowning.
Dream her lost history.
Give up your plans.
Begin flowering.
with gratitude to Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s Swiss Army Man