poems by rachel kellum
to comment ✒️ click on a title
Gossip: Another Way to Sky
Another Way to Sky, oil on canvas, 36''x36'', Rachel Kellum
If you live free, know this:
your life is the jailor’s grist
served in hot whispers
to prisoners she keeps and is.
When she offers you
a plate, don’t eat.
Despite her smile,
it is full of spit.
Fly on the outside,
on the cloud’s upside.
Grin. Write it:
I’ve nothing to hide.
2011
when you pass through me
as a flock of ones and zeros
the ones become your fingers
your black eyelashes the Ls
in your night strummed lullaby
the zeros our morning mouths
when you pass through me
pixilated blue eyed glint
your digital dimple touches
my screen lips and my heart
skips a rope of ones and zeros
when you pass through me
your name a blinking bouquet
of ones and zeros my right knee
buckles to kneel to ask deep space
to marry me always it says yes
2011
Umbilicus
I was important once, not just lumpy scar
hiding in fat, revealing myself in hunger.
Door to a spiral bridge
connecting budding flesh to pulsing organ,
I heard hard boiled eggs and broccoli whisper,
swallowed chocolate flavored blood
to grow this body, a black hole
delivering myself inside out.
Who knew when I began a life link,
I would become a tiny hand holding life’s lint.
I gave you life. You are right
to fill me with jewels.
I am the wounded crown
of your human birth, glorious.
2011
For Sons on Solstice
Because my boys still enjoy me and their smiles
are nearly mine, and summer solstice shines
through trees where thin mosquitoes whine
in shade, I took them to a park eight miles
from home today. With frisbee, rackets, birdie, balls
and wandering black dog, I watched them play and vie
for turns with me, throwing, swinging, thwacking sky
toys. Other children in the park, too small
to make a frisbee glide or birdie fly with ease
wandered in, and my two welcomed awkward play
with saintly patience, relieved to have a break
from brotherly, pleading motherly, disharmonies.
I marvel these two rivals fled my body, display
my wry dichotomies, love and sigh me awake.
2009
The 14th Way of Looking at “August and Everything After”
XIV.
Will summer remember
my feet searching her rivers
for solid earth?
The current was something
like thighs.
The line, my drunken orbit.
2011
for C.S.
Perhaps it is not a giving up, but a giving in
After loving a garden
a long time through hail
and too much rain
or drought and wilting heat,
it is hard to stop watering it,
wishing in it, to know when
to let earth take cucumbers
I let yellow into bitterness
on the stem, comfrey
surrendered to grasshoppers
I could not kill
who shredded leaves to lace
in hope they’d leave basil alone,
rosemary that never bloomed
whose tips I harvested anyway.
Sometimes, when I am tired
of hoping, I begin to pray
for first frost.
2011