poems by rachel kellum
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From Our Basement
I couldn’t stop piling
musty pillows, broken toys,
empty cardboard boxes waiting three years
to move me out of the house
where my marriage ended.
I’m still here.
This pile for donation:
jeans outgrown by widening hips and lengthened
legs, toys for babies, colorful under dust,
the light fixture we replaced, the rack
we hung our coats upon for years.
This pile for a friend:
a bag of small clothes and little dolls,
my mother’s fine table that lost a chair
all those years ago, thrown
in anger by her second husband,
and my second husband’s grandmother’s
once pristine solid dark wood table
whose chairs cracked by
leaning back too much, surface scarred
by careless forks and wayward fire.
This pile to recycle:
the boxes, broken down flat.
This pile for the earth:
anything peed upon by proud cats
or sleeping toddlers, moldy rugs and concrete dust
destroyed by basement water, clothes broken open
by busy knees, toys by small boys’ hands, and
tiny plastic parts that lost their large plastic families.
I’m done collecting junk,
holding onto dust.
I returned it to itself.
You know how it goes,
the saying.
My daughter and I hauled pile four
in three
truckloads to the landfill where
expressionless glancing men shoveled
rancid trash onto a stained conveyor belt.
Two times in the white truck we backed in
and tossed our junk on the rank concrete.
Throw it away, most of us say.
You may have heard there is no away,
and they, of course, are right,
but that the earth
would open its mouth
and swallow
what is broken, useless and stinking in my life
healed me, even as I cringed
at my own shameful waste.
I half expected the attendant to shake her head, click
her tongue, but this is Morgan County, and I’m Green.
No one cared but me. They took my money. Six bucks
a load to unload more than they could ever bury.
The third load skipped the conveyor
and went straight to the earth:
the peeling old front door (what did we save it for?)
the bent aluminum swing set
the futon we made love on,
that our kids
napped and peed on in trusted, diaperless sleep,
that I leaned upon to push our second son
in a great thrust of inner wind
into a dry world from inside
my wet and bleeding one,
that held you in the basement
when we began to separate
That futon was so bright there at the foot
of the pile, the most beautiful of trash,
hunched over in accidental sorrow
like the woman I saw thrown from her car,
breast hanging out the bottom of her disheveled shirt,
unmoving. I prayed someone would come
rescue her because I couldn’t stop,
already late for the airport.
She was dead on arrival.
Nobody saved her.
Now, at the landfill, I hoped
the men to our left tossing
roof shingles one by one by hand
from a low trailer would see the futon
in its red, black and tan
southwest glory
and save it, take it home,
kiss their wives upon it.
They were too busy.
I watched it, a bright memory
folded in on itself in the rearview mirror
and drove over the scale
lighter, on time.
2011
Graduation Day
for Jose, whose afro could never be contained by such a small cap
The wind
doesn’t care
about graduation
or ceremony.
It celebrates beginnings
by ripping music
off stands,
flipping modest women’s
flowery skirts,
lock by lock freeing
hair from clips and careful
spray, throwing
mortarboards
upon the earth.
Go ahead, pray—
but it is wind
that blows our kids
into the world.
2011
Where you are
While you walk in another land—
where Besh o droM concerts are missed for taxes
and young men cancel their own birthday celebrations,
and tired aunts scold and bite after American sons
who leave old mothers dreaming of red fields and
dead fathers drinking, and grandmothers have removed
black scarves from their white heads to lie down to die—
you also walk around in my body.
Last night we met in my office head,
filled with white bed. I rearranged the gauze
curtains, hiding from shadows with papers.
Your Chakrasamvara teeth shone in the blue light,
waiting. In the corner of the alley attached,
a tall doll—Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince—
leaned, left behind by a retired colleague.
I saved him because I know what he means.
I also find you in this house where I’ve been
painting two worn rooms. Dreary antique whites
and greys slowly turning icy waterfall and
Tibetan white. I am tired of paint, of tedious blue tape.
So, I call you into the rooms, eating your apricot
spread on toast, or brushing your teeth.
Then I am brushing crisp skies to hold you,
to hold everything we will swallow and lose.
Thankfully, this morning, there you were
in my friend’s poem. My heart was not wrapped
in New Mexican corn but Hungarian head scarves,
smelling of our sex and breakfast, cottonwood
seed shells staining the bottoms of our bare feet.
I picked yours off with my teeth. The revolution
of red is always quietly here. Right here on the small
planet of our bed. It has to start somewhere.
2011
~With thanks to Stewart Warren’s “She Asks for a Poem”
thunderheads
i sat in the mercury café
(funny, at first i typed cage)
and it was full
of the cool people.
too many of them. none mine.
as my gps led me out of the congested city,
the interesting knot untied and dissolved.
clouds ate the frayed ends.
we were doing what hicks do, wit said,
watching dumb
as
clouds roll by
2011
To every one I tried to eat, I’m sorry
I have chased mountains
and quiet men, wolf women
and booky teachers:
Help me!
I’ve been every mother,
frowned
and stomped for silence
hoping it would
point.
Even so,
my throat’s
been
so thin nothing
could pass, my abdomen
immense
globe of hunger stretched
around boundless
ache.
Wandering ghost belly
No woodsy cabin or bear man
fed. No singing or dying
woman,
witch or nun could satisfy
with wands or words
or all the grief
I could eat.
I had it wrong.
Only when in uncalled dream
I found one hovering just above
no within
no as
(me) unadorned,
clear as ringing
goblet
casting
prism mandorlas
did lost paths merge.
My belly turned inside
outward,
swallowed me
along with the spinning
world
and everything
was perfect, of one
taste.
It fades, this flexibility.
Sometimes I walk
around allowing all
passage,
my human throat and belly
a ruse for the fact
that the path to this
much space was
never any
where or who
but here.
2011
Brother
I’m the one you used
to love when
you thought
I was you. I’m not
sorry for our fresh
duality. Growth
cannot undo itself.
Our father’s heart
burns in both
our chests.
And yes,
our mother’s too.
No wonder we
were doomed to part.
Two chambers
in a family juggling
bad blood.
I’m obsessed with red,
you with blue.
Or maybe the reverse.
Truth is we’re not
right or left,
brother, moving blood
is just what we do.
Whether you love
me or not, push
or pull, beaten
and beating,
I’m still you.
2011
Even though the captain says
we’re five minutes
ahead of schedule
the sky cannot drop me
soon enough into your arms.
The sun always shines here
above this vapor sea
above our dark flounder
above our never wings.
Upward when we first broke
through I pressed my face
against small pane to feel
light, the same light we greet
with feet on earth, through house
windows, bleary squares catching
and casting our every orange rising,
praying to each other’s warm smile.
Miles closer to the sun, I am
closer and closer to you,
landing somehow in midair
and somehow falling.
2008/2011
Inside your afterword
for Stewart Warren
Where poems are a dark house on a mesa.
This room gibbous lit over banked fire.
This one dawn, and dawn and dawn.
The basement: full sun through thick aspen,
flicking light pins down a pencil thin
stream cut through ancient concrete.
The doors have no handles or locks, but swing
if I barely lean.
Some squeak. Others revolve in whispers.
Where is the floor? And how
did the quetzal find me here?
Around its leg a metal tag,
engraved Atogaki.
I hold on. We lift up.
All the windows open.
The rooftops are gone.
2011