poems by rachel kellum
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Loving Into
I have loved into the mess of things—
through the carefully plotted luck
of a new greenhouse—everything green
in a few weeks! Lush at once!
It must be my green thumb, you think,
until next spring’s pill bugs.
I have loved into seasons that do not align.
Nothing thrives in sync, on time.
One side, often west, green through winter,
now overgrown with too many seed heads,
carrots lustily dusting you each time you pass,
spider mites taking up residence in umbels,
beet stalks gone to star-studded seed.
I have loved into the other sides as well—
the south, the east, trying to do it all,
tend and protect all the tender greens
that disappear overnight to slugs
or wilt in summer’s early heat.
Prune tomatoes raring to raggedly leap
indeterminately above their cages
seeking some string to climb out of reach.
I have loved into nothing becoming something
beautiful at the same rate, but all booming
at some stage of growth or decay—
nothing universally, Instagramably photographable.
The only observable signal: I lost control,
or really, this is how real greenhouses age
into the wildness of benign neglect
an exhaustion so pure, one can only trust,
much like my body, my mothering, my love.
after therapy
in the close quarters
of dream
Granny came to me
uncharacteristically
hugged me
her dumpling body ancient
enveloping
mine pressed into hers
like a thumb
in pie dough
her nose that familiar dollop
in generations of faces
and right behind her
warm release
my father
her son
having waited his turn
pulls me close
to press an awkward
fatherkiss
against the corner
of my mouth
hold me in his dark
discomfort I welcome
like an apology
like a late
thank you
I wake to
inbox poems
three in a row
on the dead visiting
when they
when we
are ready
moon kites
skirting a moon
gravity released
their faces into youth
skin floating over the bones
of four complicated kites
strings attached from every edge
to four hearts
or wherever the center
of the body resides
every cell radially
arrayed
around it, bouyant
that joy
tugging on the string
and running
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 woolen 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