poems by rachel kellum

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2025 Rachel Kellum 2025 Rachel Kellum

Dear Danny,

I forgot I bought him the book

First thing today, Grey texted six photos

of Jack’s “What Can I Say”

A destiny read, he said

 

Cage’s chance operations

 

Grey’s fingers on the edge

of morning pages, Amor Fati’s long spine

pried wide, at first I thought

his fingernails were mine

 

Remember him?

 

Jack too large for the tiny screen

I grabbed my own worn copy

scanned the contents, page 66, read it

to Dorell steeping coffee in the kitchen

 

Jack Fest program tucked in

 

Seven years ago, the night

you met Grey, just 18, at Lithic you said

How are you or something and he said

Tired, life is long and you said

 

in your slow, crooked-smile drawl

 

We can only hope and he shrugged

the smallest shrug. Later that night

he hung briefly off his belt from rafters

in Wendy’s garage, pulled up

 

against gravity

 

with hard wiry arms. I wondered

why he wore his black hoody up

the next warm day, stacking a precarious cairn

on the edge of Trickster Ridge, a signpost to life:

 

Go any direction from here

 

By miracle, Jack still holds Grey’s hand

in Leadville, sits here with me, in me

watching emptiness, like Wallace,

push snow off pinyon branches

 

What can we say

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2025 Rachel Kellum 2025 Rachel Kellum

Because No Poem will be Read at Trump’s Second Inauguration, Here is Mine

Convinced by scientific TikTok evidence, my sons

               believe the earth won’t sustain them as old men

Undeterred, one surfs wild rivers and steep snow slopes

Dante’s new Virgil, smiling guide to final earthly joys

The other builds gorgeous archaeologies of sound

ephemeral festival cities for the hopeful, the lost

My daughter fights fires, serves those bent by poverty

pours love into her infant, sparkling boy

My husband builds houses for Buddhist lamas, for peace

              for the comfortable rich who cannot sleep

I teach children how to nurture worms, sprouts, compost

make murals for their greenhouse, useful clay cups

Hear this, you broken, misled, profit-blinded, king-minded hoard-men

               We will not stop, we will never give up

Your four-year swansong will come to its natural end

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2024 Rachel Kellum 2024 Rachel Kellum

I Pull Away from Screens like a Junkie, Reluctantly—

to wash the dog in October

tied to the sunny porch, drying out

barking as I go about filling buckets

 

to haul ten gallons of water

to five bickering chickens where I see

Brownie’s plucked feathers grew back

 

to yank blossom-end-rot tomatoes

off dwindling patio plants

before the others go bad too

 

to notice rusty hummers have moved on

and my troubled neighbor

must be drinking again by the sound of it

 

and my ear is still an echo chamber

hissing like a seashell I carry everywhere

an improvement over the usual sound

 

of distant heavy machinery in my head

as if men were shifting gears in me, moving dirt,

tearing up trees, pouring a concrete path through a forest

 

abandoning failed broken slabs

and bottles of yellow piss

on the shoulder of my wilderness

 

—the most anti-consumerist, purposeless

I’ve been in months, sitting here, scribbling this

watching the dog grow glossy

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2024 Rachel Kellum 2024 Rachel Kellum

Raising Nightshades

All summer, every step into the greenhouse,

she trilled to her tomatoes, Hello, beautiful babies.  

Finally, finally, come cooler fall,

shaking her head, she noted they’d been over-watered,

reset the timer to water them less often.

Surveying damage with the shame of a busy mother,

she harvested all the red cracked globes, too embarrassed

to offer the moldered surplus to colleagues.

She threw them out to compost, set to save the rest.

Their radial crusted cracks possible harbors of mold and rot,

she carved their tops like jack-o-lantern lids lifted by the stem.

She blanched, slip-skinned and cored them,

crushed the slick remains, stuffed basil into the boiling pot,

and canned three quarts of spaghetti sauce.

Knowing damn well the alkaloids will make her knees ache,

she vowed to eat her harvest anyway, in salsas too.

She’s sung to these tomatoes grown of saved seed,

and rising stiffly with a groan from a low couch,

she’ll wonder, How could my babies do this to me?

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2024 Rachel Kellum 2024 Rachel Kellum

Antidotes for Fear of Losing Him

When I imagine him

hopelessly cold

as I go to spoon him

or gone too many hours

found clutching midnight’s

kettlebell

or the hammer dropped

just out of reach where he fell

or incomprehensibly

slouched beneath

a splattered piñon canopy

beloved calloused finger

stuck in the holy gun

I swallow tears

in my throat like medicine

imagine his ghost

next to me

in the half warm bed

spooning me spooning

the wet-necked shell of him

a nest holding a nest holding a nest

or his broad ghost back

and thick ghost biceps—

a sieve—straining to lift me

off the floor

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2024 Rachel Kellum 2024 Rachel Kellum

Death is Taking Care of Us All

The shrunken mouse

in the drive

once looked into Her soft eyes

and huffed.

At Her empty breast,

mosquitos dried up

in August.

Where are their thready bodies?

In the bellies of birds.

My blood too

in the bellies of birds.

Where are their singing bodies?

Busy with their lavish harvest of piñon?

Languishing in 5G dreams?

Either way, my suet brick—untouched

for weeks at 20 degrees.

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2024 Rachel Kellum 2024 Rachel Kellum

You Understood

The children’s meeting hall where I teach

is painted pale pink.

A memory of Mr. Croutcher rises

sitting at his desk in a 6th grade classroom

every wall Pepto Bismol pink on his request.

Rumor had it he was gay, hence the pink

since people saw his car at Bobby’s

but this day he told us jails and asylums

are painted pink to calm the patients.

He boomed at me good naturedly

“Rachel, when I say, ‘Speak up,’

who is the subject of the sentence?”

I had a sense, a hunch, but my pink tongue and lips

had no words for it. Pink walls abandoned me.

“You understood!” he shouted, “You understood!”

Once I did, I never forgot.

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My Work in Other Venues Rachel Kellum My Work in Other Venues Rachel Kellum

Walking the Burn…

…my new collection, available from Middle Creek Publishing on March 1, 2025

“If the life lived is the burn, then these poems are paths through this charred landscape that allow us to not only see what is scarred and wounded, but also the astonishing beauty of how things—and people—heal.”

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of Hush, All the Honey and The Unfolding

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2024 Rachel Kellum 2024 Rachel Kellum

spontaneous circle

I walked into a spontaneous circle

started by a small girl, arms out, hands reaching

for the hands of unknown adults

 

heading for their cars

after the local food producers’ shindig

they made room for me, smiling

 

she spoke quietly, blessed the fire, the wind

the water, the food of this valley

looked at me, said, your turn

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2024 Rachel Kellum 2024 Rachel Kellum

Pruning Nasturtiums

It hurts to rip them out

nasturtium vines, sweet blooms

green moons afloat on strings

smothering young lettuce

 

with shade, perfume

Hacked to the stem, I wait

They will come again, unspool

I will notice when

they are just right

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