poems by rachel kellum
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Three and a Half Years after the Death of a Guerita
There is no time
to spend with you today,
lover of all things Latin
(especialmente the men),
except in songs that we once
heard together and sang.
Remember how our sister-sound
would mesh, two voices
from our mother’s throat?
We made one sound
of her parted flesh, a boat
with two sails blown full.
On this Day of the Dead I wear
your black peacoat, its pockets
finally emptied of your things:
old tissues, El Salvador keychain,
plastic packet of gum with foil
burst open over two empty wells.
There are many ways to hold lost hands.
Hold the things they held.
For two years, I touched the tissues,
the ones you worried chemo fear into.
They finally fell apart. I chewed stale gum.
I can’t recall—are these gloves yours?
I forget what you wore even as I wear it.
Your hands are cold.
Do you remember how
the grave digger surfed the water
in your Illinois grave? Oh, the March rain!
You—in walnut casket and concrete vault,
your faux gold name plate crushed
under his boot—were the board.
He rode you. Wow, look at the buoyancy,
he said in wonder, arms out for balance.
I was glad Mom had left; thought
Shakespeare would have loved this script.
I grinned. That lovable fool,
I shoveled along with him. Good worker,
he said, while I tucked you in from the edge
of the hole, slid and fell and stood and threw in
a foot of dirt. Aguas, aguas, I heard you say,
Careful, careful. Water gurgled and
sucked at clumps with thirsty slurps.
I couldn’t bring myself to stand
on your body, twice-boxed.
It would have made the work easier.
I didn’t clean my black boots a year,
whacked the clay-rich clods into a plastic pail
now lost somewhere in the basement.
I had meant to wet and sculpt of them
a headless goddess like the ones
you made in college, recuerdes?
Why do I save these odd mementos?
What good is it to clutch what enclosed you?
It only makes me sad, and, shhhh, relevado,
when I forget their context, when I forget
the way you filled your clothes, when I lose
the mud that holds you, waterproofed.
Saving and losing you, over and over:
such strange ointment, mi manita.
2007-2016
Translations, for my mother:
guerita: a white girl beloved of Latinos
especialmente: especially
aguas, aguas: literally waters, waters, but figuratively, move easy like water, be careful. Becca’s husband said this as she wheeled around her IV rack at her first chemo. She translated the words for me at the time so I would understand he didn’t literally mean waters, waters
recuerdes: remember?
relevado: relieved
mi manita: short for hermanita, little sister, it is especially a term of endearment for a sister for whom one’s love goes deeper than blood.
Middle School Football
Our sons, their plastic shoulders dream
Of manhood. Each time a body falls
And a groan rises up like a man,
And the body is rolled or limps off field,
Holding a stomach, a wobbled leg,
There is a mother somewhere.
Maybe her eyes water, too.
2016
Books on New Year’s Eve
TV tired of the stare,
Hummus, salmon, mandarins consumed,
The child’s chocolate wafers shared,
Facebook a bankrupt moon,
Over crumbs and a countdown dare
The family wonders what to do.
The woman opens poems.
The man, his mystery.
The child finds riddles hidden.
Quiet is a key.
No one looks up when
The metal vent bangs with heat.
Boggle Love Poem
I would loan my own—
No, better, I would
Make for you a coat,
Embroider all the words
For love in Latin,
Fill it with fine batting,
With a bit of Tao.
No, it would be a quilt,
Warmer than coal
Fuller than nil.
Born beneath it,
We two,
Despite the old ban,
Our breath a quiet lilt.
Earth would tilt anew,
Chase our canned heat
Like a con sun,
Like a dumb lab’s tail
And never rest.
The tin moon, jealous
Of the way our love lit
Up a continent,
Would quit.
2016
How to write a Boggle poem: Dust off your old Boggle game (remember? the one on the closet shelf sitting on top of five different kinds of Monopoly board games). Shake the letters, remove the lid, turn over the three-minute timer, and write a list of as many words as you can find. When the last grain of sand drops and time runs out, turn over the timer again. Write a poem for three minutes, using as many words from your list as possible. Among the words I found in this game were quit, tin, lit, lilt, bat, ban, con, quilt, bit, Tao, nil, lab, no, tail, it, and tilt. My sweetheart read me his word list, so I borrowed some of his findings, too: coat, coal, loan, can, and Latin.
Weltschmerz, or How a Girl Saved the Pie
I was not thankful the morning
The girl listed all the people
She guessed for whom I was thankful.
She guessed everyone right.
I was fine with being wrong.
Despite a friend’s advice not to bake
When having negative thoughts,
I took the chance of ruining
Pumpkin pie.
With grand introduction,
In TV voice, the girl made me
The master chef of my own
Cooking show. I wanted
To smile. I couldn’t. I rolled
The dough, handed her the pin.
She rolled. I measured spice.
We took turns turning
Black spoons over the bowl.
The spices look like skin.
There’s mine, she said, cinnamon.
You’re this one!
Ginger, I clarified.
And Daddy’s here.
Nutmeg.
With pestle and mortar,
We hand-ground cloves
Looking like no one we know.
Stirred, we were a new skin
We couldn’t name.
And joy, buried beneath late November,
Knew I would remember
To tell you here.
24 November 2016
with thanks to Shea
two gratitudes
thankful tonight
to be infinitely smaller
than all the tiny stars
thankful tonight
to not know which
are long dead
Super Moon
When the moon comes up
it doesn’t care about my mantras.
When the moon comes up
it doesn’t think about the egg it will become.
When the moon comes up
I ignore the crackling fire I built to celebrate it.
Well Up
In 1677, Leeuwenhoek scooped his joy
from a woman and leapt from bed.
“Before six beats of the pulse [had] passed,”
his microscope revealed a swell of sperm
damning the dry edge
of their pressed liquid world.
* * * *
La Rana clings to grasses on the shore,
yellow eyes following flies.
* * * *
Impenetrable paths, impenetrable paths,
the seeds of El Melon whisper until
someone cracks the rind.
* * * *
Is all a practice in welling up?
* * * *
I stand in the high desert
with an emerald umbrella.
* * * *
La Maceta breaks open,
roots too hungry for terra cotta.
* * * *
Giant blueprints of poems spill out.
Rewrite the ends.
* * * *
Judyth says,
Make sandstone altars to the ordinary!
Dig up, display your bones, your rusty implements!
* * * *
Leap from the dry edge!
2016
after Family Matters
“Family Matters” by Alexandra de Kempf
Birth dates sprout from our heads
As lottery numbers. Fill in the holes.
Shrug at losing the upper range.
Luck is luck and winning could be
As easy as family love
And the array of digits
Ancients assigned to days
To mark our arrivals, departures
And fortunes like spirals.
Perhaps the history of humanity
Is ruled by golden ratios
Of hermit shells, phallic risings
Of red flamingo flowers,
Lineages of human bodies spinning outward,
Spaceward, 3-D DNA. Forget ladders.
Are you a ladder?
Has your health been hammered?
Is your sight obscured
By capital’s metastasis, brain blossoming
Cancer’s white words: not enough
Morphing into more, more? What’s eating you?
The writing is on the wall.
We’ve stopped reaching for each other,
Prohibited by policies banning touch
Learned by clicking state screens.
Print your HR certificate, file for proof.
Instead, we point, mouths wide, teeth bared
Not quite laughing, perhaps shocked
Or screaming. Do you know a rich man’s body
From his stack of bloody books?
Or her Universal Perfect Breasts from fruit
Or the font of bottles?
Don’t nurse. He owns you.
Gift your kids strange teddy bears
He sells so they can sleep alone.
Nestle in with Ambien.
Get six hours for work. Hope for eight.
Let them cry it out in the dark.
Soon they’ll need only a phone,
A silken screen, a monthly plan
To stay in touch.
Don’t bother counting years
Before your children go.
They fall away like leaves,
Lost lottery tickets
You forgot to cash in.