poems by rachel kellum
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Easter Art Class
I started the day singing
with children I love
placed palettes of paint
paper and brushes
at every seat
to help them celebrate spring
and laughed with them
at their muscled bunnies
sang about their purple rain
pointed out the beauty
of their blue-black storms
and even the red
dripping from the upper edge
of the page
of a fifth-grade girl
old enough
to know how soon
the newly born
face danger.
I hung her work
in the hallway
where it took
its rightful place
among
festive eggs
and pink tulips.
30 poems in 30 days?
As usual, I’m going to try! Click the image above for prompts and support from the National Poetry Writing Month website, where inspiration is posted every day if you are stumped.
His First Snow
Spring snow: This “relatively rare weather event is among only six times it has happened in the last 130 years.” Westside Seattle.com, 13 March 2026
Almost two, Cal knew instinctively
what to do—touch his tongue
to the shelf of snow
on the large pot’s rim.
His dark eyes darkened more, shifted,
registering cold,
the almost too much of it.
He bent, let it melt and drain from his lips,
turned, walked ten steps,
tilted back his face
to take in heavy flakes, we thought,
mouth open, nose running,
tongue flicking once at his own salt.
“Ah!” he said, “Ah!”
pointing to white sky,
not at snow,
as we briefly, romantically supposed,
but at the low drone of a jet
beyond sight.
Dogerrel in Dark Times
Living in a mountain paradise,
An hour out from the possible presence of ICE,
I take daily tinctures of vice to stay awake—fuck it: woke.
This morning’s dose: Hughes’ The Ways of White Folks—
Acrid, choked drops under the tongue
To inoculate myself from the plague
I inhaled in a crowd of gentle, well-meaning white folks,
Hand-tied by privilege (are you?), leaning in, cheering on white poets—
Two lovers who promised in wide gesture and easy rhyme
That joy under the moon is resistance in dark times
Which I suspect is only true
If you are black, brown, queer or chronic-blue.
It Could be Otherwise
It is this.
This waking in the warmth of us,
his brown shoulder ever
my western mountain
inching slowly, as mountains do
toward me. I am no valley.
The long cloud of my arm
drapes along his gentle slope
a promise of weather.
The silence holds us
as it holds everything,
preferring not one thing
over another.
with a grateful nod to Jane Kenyon’s “Otherwise”
Giant Hand
Muscular cottonwoods dwindle to tips
reaching for light, tight buds refuse
the ways of roots mirrored below.
They plan to open a thousand eyes while I
spread out blindly underground, white,
thirsty, unaware of the entire structure
spanning over me—a giant hand built
by my dark wandering, begging for water.
Wasted Blessings
In early March’s greenhouse
I tear up moss beds with bare hands
toss them into compost
along with perfectly edible beet greens
in their second or third season
with surprising small beets stacked
at the base of their stalks
like merry-go-round ponies on poles
rising above the woody mother root
hard and mottled as this grandmother’s fist
marbled inside like an old tree knot
white and red-grained
my shame forgiven ten minutes later
by a mother deer, queen
of the compost heap, who
startled and startling me
munched with her fawns
on blessings I thought
I’d wasted
Four Hands
One summer, broke, young mothers,
newly single, she and I massaged
lonely married men. Most washed.
Wearing only his ring, Starved, he said,
one even cried. Tell her, we said,
four hands crisscrossing the cross of him.
Others laid their tiny golden yokes
on the table, bedside.
Begged for more.
We are mothers, we said. You could
be the law. When the soundtrack of
The Last Temptation of Christ finally stopped,
zipped up, ripped off,
each man thought,
where is my happy ending.
His Lines
Phone light dances across the panes
of his small, rectangular black-framed glasses.
With my eye I draw the shape of his hand becoming a wrist,
forearm becoming a bicep, shoulder, inclined neck
like a hungry ant crawling the line he makes against space,
pressed upon the world, no pencil in hand.
A young artist once, I realized that to simply perceive
line and value—light, penumbra, shadow—
is as rewarding as creating them on paper, on canvas.
I vowed to live my life like that: no patron, no place
needed to store large, lonely Modern paintings,
or cardboard sleeves to stash charcoal sketches, yellowing.
Here I am now, in my 50s, unknown but knowing.
My own lines softened, blending. So be it.
“What do you want to do,” he asks.
“Stare at you watching your phone,” I say and ask,
“What do you want to doooooo,” flubbing my finger
over my lips on the oooooo like two fleshy, silly guitar strings,
my mouth the sound hole.
He grins, “Now I don’t know, since you asked it like that.
Anything is possible.”
For Dorell on our 13th Valentine’s Day