poems by rachel kellum
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family organism
I want to say, please see
your arms and smile my back
my hours your broken strut
your roof my road to sleep
my heart your sacred head
your bardo prayers my seat
my silent miles your breath
let late november
barely warm coals die
in thick ash, let them
sun warms my death pose
on the couch, grinning
lush green geranium
settles into light, low
lifts one bloom
to a large smeared window
2020
Midnight Transmission Reading
Here are four poems from my recent reading with hosts Jesse Maloney and Orlando White. With the help of a vile vial of liquid ginseng, this old girl managed to stay awake past midnight!
For more videos of this and other Midnight Transmission readings, please visit Jesse 5-0 Productions.
Blue Daughters
Minefields
Sutra for Letting Go of Aversion
Mother Dharma
A child is a slow
moving thought
you watch.
Its departing birth
a new entrance,
subtle, inching back
into into into you.
You surrender
your eyes, let it
commandeer hands,
arms and legs,
eat your heart,
guts and brain,
become your bones,
your size, watch it
dissolve into a dazzling
dangerous world,
into its own child.
Helpless, welcome
it like sky burial:
child into child
into child burial.
Embrace the lineage
of generous forgetting,
your liberation.
Midnight Transmission Promo
Enjoy this new late night reading series hosted by Diné Nation poets Jesse T. Maloney and Orlando White, transmitting the Word from the Rez. It was an unforgettable experience for me--an honor to read with such powerful women and be buoyed up by that smart, gentle audience in the digital realm. Jesse and Orlando are everything you want in a host: gracious, kind, humble and humorous AF. Clips from the evening will be posted soon.
The crumble on the muffin was connecting with an audience member who is the daughter of my most beloved college mentor, Dr. Joellen Jacobs, the woman who, nearly thirty years ago, walked me into the house of poetry, holding my hand through every image and cadence of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and, later, Stevens' "The Snow Man." I found a home. The sonic, imagistic and philosophical joy I experienced in these two poems have guided my aesthetic choices for decades.
I hate to say it, but what a trip when it's true: it's a small, small world.
D-Con
We found his box of green pellets, stuffed
the poison in our cheeks, carried it away
to a high place out of reach of the children:
a plastic bag of pillows dangling from a top bunk.
We tried not to swallow en route, leapt the chasm,
made a dozen deadly deposits in the pillows,
hoped against hope the toxic dust would not
dry us up, turn our blood against our own hearts.
In the meantime, in the daily hurried rituals
of scurry, gather and hide, barely sleeping,
we forgot where we tucked away our riches.
When it snowed, a woman found our pine nuts
in her snow boot. When she spilled her coffee,
grass seeds cached in towels high on a shelf
spilled out like confetti into her mouth. The next day,
stuck to threads of a cotton nest chewed into a mattress
pad stored under the bed, she found our mother
a brown, dried horror husk, mealworms long dead
in the small bowl of her skull, the ribs of her chest.
Grocery Store Orchid
I’d never buy one.
It was a gift from a woman
who believes in me.
Quite soon
the stalk yellowed,
flowers drooped and fell.
The orchid, my orchid,
spends most of its life
as leaves, teaches
under water me
by spilling over, dying off,
teaches wait for me
and time, as always,
is beauty’s only currency.
The Old Phones
The old phones were family pets,
shared, oily, of heft, a comfort,
yet also retractable weapons
you could chuck at your sister,
black her eye and reel in
like a slick catfish. Yes, they were
small, warm bodies or, at least, body parts,
you could innocently fondle, a young cat
cradled against your neck with spiral tail
you could wrap around yourself
a dozen times, a DNA boa, a fetus
whose umbilical cord could stretch
across the kitchen, down the stairs,
through the hall, pulse invisibly under
your door where you could wait forever
on the floor for that boy to say something
into the dark shell of your ear floating
inside the flowered womb of your plush
carpeted bedroom. You could listen
to his busy signal, the silence inside
his steady breathing, all heart
beats. You could hear the voice
of your mother in the distance,
humming receive, receive, receive.
handbuilding us
love scores me / slips me
sticks me / smooths me
to you before we / grow leather hard
carves its / name into this
body we’ve become / fragile greenware
handed into fire / one earthen vessel
we hope for no fissures / we hope to hold
whatever we must / water wine blood
even cracked / a bowl can hold
almonds pencils / seedling coins dust