poems by rachel kellum
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The Imaginary Man in My Head
that pale, cool editor
wouldn’t let me write about sweetness.
He called it Hallmark shit.
So I kept it to myself,
lived it with my children,
unashamed to watch the minutes
go by wordless, illiterate
and toothless as a babe.
The problem—there is no record of love
but for what was written
in my children’s cells and mine.
I can only hope the hard stories
I chose to tell the man do not overwrite
the truth of our lived love,
the endless hours we wrote upon each other.
the days were long and the years were short, the old mother said
I wake from a nap after a week with my grown children and grandson. I awake in sharp panic, confusion that years of constant attention, presence, babies at my sleeping breast in a family bed for years, the books and books and books I read in a growing cast of character voices, countless steamed broccoli florets and chicken and sack lunches of carrots, peanut butter and jelly, apples sliced, sippy cups washed, school work begged and dallied, sleepless fevers and yellow stained cloth diapers and tooth fairy notes in curly script, the realm of naked toddlers, dancing wildly on rocks and cawing like ravens, bed jumping and good night kisses, all of it, all of it, over, memories faded but for videos and photos I fear will never be printed, just lingering as fragile code. I awake in slow motion panic. Did it happen? Where did it all go? My life now spread out before me in service of others’ children, my life expanding and shrinking toward what? Time for myself? What I dreamed when my children were young and now is barely here in the snippets a teacher steals before breakfast and after dinner with her exhausted husband? My bed the only place I’m free. My body’s nerves, the tree of me, a three-dimensional history of lost memories, beg me to dig myself up, replant myself at my children’s feet.
Against Lethe
My sister and her daughter
pack away what they can
of our mother’s precious things—
jewelry, a box of letters,
photos of her children,
dead daughter, mother, father,
already folded like gowns
deep in the drawers of her brain—
fragile places we pray
amyloid plaques and tau tangles
will not rob before her heart gives out,
mercifully holds the cup to her lips
dripping with the waters of Mnemosyne.
Instead, we watch her pace the shore,
waiting for her ferry across Lethe.
May she not cross before she dies.
May we not have to say goodbye twice.
When she asks to return home
to gather her things— the car,
the couch, the king-size bed and flat screen TV—
all she hopes to squeeze
into the new assisted living condo
she and her husband will never reach—
no one has the heart to tell the truth.
All is at auction as we speak.
There will be no material reunion.
We salve her heart with empty promises.
To tell otherwise, the specialist says,
to reorient her to reality, would just be cruel.
My heart rails against the lie
that silences my desire to not steal
from her the noble truth of suffering,
this woman whose body opened
like a bleeding eye to birth me,
cut upon the table,
she who will carry her house
on proud, rock shoulders
into the belly of the earth.
Her mother will catch her.
My sister will kiss her on the mouth.
Mom will sob into her curls.
That night, the three of them will sleep,
tangled in her bed, dreaming of us.
the myth of blue blood
from the base of a remote mountain
named for the blood of Christ
in bed, over bagels, chicken soup, stir fry
we stare into our palms
watch protests on screens
city streets pumping people, songs, signs
like starved blood toward the heart
of a country no one can find
Hufflepuff Home for the Holiday
My youngest
now a man
spread out
on the basement
couch
with two giants
marbled dogs
Eo and Fang
a fragrant heap
of ten-legged sleep
when we forget to net
robins strip the tree’s
cherries in two days, no jam
no pie, no crumble
How to Handle a Narcissist from Space
Respond to his self-serving praise with a thumbs up.
Say nothing.
Twiddle your thumbs.
Fiddle with the floating mic with your friends:
Stand it up, lay it down, watch it drift, spin it like a drill.
Clap and laugh like kids at these antics while he waits.
Use comm delay to your innocent advantage.
Let him sit in silence a full minute.
Pretend to wonder if you lost contact.
Ask if ground is still on the line.
I am, yes, I am, says the narcissist.
Listen to the crowd laugh on your beautiful planet.
Do not apologize.
See 8:30-10:00 of Trump calls Artemis II astronauts after historic moon flyby: 'We'll plant our flag again'
Christina Hammock Koch, Mission Specialist, Artemis II
Her bare face framed
in a floating halo
of untamed hair
she adjusts her socks
plays with and parts
a shoulder curl, nods
and smiles, like I do
patient, while men talk
about stars, turning
toward black space
lights out, to see them
not twinkling (she shakes
her head, mouths no)
just perfect pinpricks
of light, he says.
Someone, please
pass her the mic.
See Do You Still See Stars In Outer Space? Kid Asks Astronauts Aboard Artemis II
with Yeats
What if every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other secular; one wise, the other foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine, the other devilish? What if there is an arithmetic or geometry that can exactly measure the slope of the balance, the dip of the scale, and so date the coming of that something? W.B Yeats, A Vision
It didn’t take long for the magpies to come back.
They are not falcons. I call them in with seedy fat.
We live on the widening gyre of justice now,
just outside the narrowing corkscrew tongue of raw power
shrinking like an old god’s cock after 2,000 years,
his self-made cage rattled with raging whimpered tears.
see W. B. Yeats and the Cycles of History for a discussion of the gyre of his famous poem, “The Second Coming.”