poems by rachel kellum
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Sometimes Women
For Susan, who frames spun mud and grass pulled from tiller tines and says they are like the way we spin and spin into certain things, making them tighter
Sometimes, after our babies die and the grief wraps around
every small dying thing, women feed worms to fallen baby birds
that won’t thrive, and, sobbing, smash their skulls with a garden rock
under the neighbor’s lilac. I couldn’t save you, we cry, and bury them there
because we’ve already buried so many in our own borders.
Sometimes, women must tell their fourteen year old daughters
we no longer love their fathers, and the girls wear pennies in their shoes
to heal the broken wing of the thing, but we leave anyway, and find
or become love, while their fathers wonder what went wrong and weep.
The daughters decide not to keep the pennies.
Sometimes, when the peppermint reaches too far beyond borders, choking
the thyme we have planted, women pull it, then poison it, against
our better judgment, and still it returns like spring. We eat of it
when there is nothing else, search for the acrid chemical on our tongues,
wonder if we have also poisoned ourselves.
Women share these things over creamy coffee, or peppermint tea,
and our liquid sorrow lifts from us, sometimes, like steam.
2009
tenth year flame
I am gathering the coals of us, love.
Remember how we used to rub our minds together and burst
Into gentle suns? Our bellies, never a bonfire, too sensible
For such waste, but a mountain campfire banked by handpicked stones:
A first kiss on the cheek, your confident guitar, my tentative drum
(Such musical foreplay in our throats), our poems– yours earthen, mine boats,
March powwows too bright, passed flowers on careful desert hikes
Collecting concretions and moon clouds.
Too many moons I have idly tended our glowing reds,
Handed mine out to likely, lonely passersby,
Leaped our rocky circle, started rambling grasses afire.
You have watched, awaited my whetted burn and wet returns.
Creeping from connubial containment, I return, I return.
Crackling here quietly with you, warming our children’s hands
And faces, becoming the flame of the sacred mundane, the play
Of bodhisattvas and saints.
Why then do I resist and scatter? Was I meant to be a running
Forest fire consuming bodies and pretty chatter?
A lithe Zippo coquette flipping spark to lips and lips and lips?
Surely I was made for more than this, yet this.
I am looking for tinder and kindling, love,
But have used up what is near. I must walk long
Nights into howling woods of hungry cells,
Gather lies of discontent and selfishness.
Will these burn forever? Toss in aversion for good measure.
But the stench! Worse than piss fir. Still I search.
Plentiful the sage, the sweetgrass of my heart,
Throw it in and pray, throw it in: we are a prayer.
2007
I danced around
I danced around
him because he
was a good lead.
I danced a dance
I couldn’t hear inside.
I could only follow,
and follow with halting
feet. A man likes to teach.
His hand on my lower
back, a nudge,
spin out, then tug,
dip, reach. I did it well
enough and smiled
for the show. I tried to add my own
steps, but bruised
his toes. I danced five,
then ten feet away,
and he stopped dancing
entirely. He watched.
He always said
he didn’t like to dance
alone. Someone laughed
at him as a child.
But I’ve always preferred to dance
solo. And when he
slowly worked his turns back
into mine, my hair
fanned out as he spun me round.
Back in his arms I
pushed him down, crawled up his legs
and spine, held his head
to the ground. Though he is strong,
he stayed there
long enough for me to run,
booed off the stage.
When he finally stood,
he didn’t cry or bow
and the crowd went wild.
2010
I was planted and my roots grew
That is what roots do.
Saguaro drowning in a swamp.
Arnica wilting on a beach.
Redbud leeched on desert plains.
Yet reaching into earth,
for sun, for what we need.
Where is the shovel?
Where are my hands?
These needles, this heart leaf,
these buds, too anemic,
too deep to wrench out
of ground and leave.
January 2010
Harvest
Just when you’ve finally grown sure hanging,
the vine drops you full of juice, your deepest hue.
Or else, a hand you’ve no eyes to see tests your edges
firm, tender, perfect and plucks. Everything moves
around your disorientation, your unleashed shape.
You reach for what held you, what you held safe.
The architecture is gone.
Next you lose your green head, your yellow core,
your bottom edge. When you think it can get no worse,
the plunge into searing heat. Skin flays open
at your neck. In a flash, you are out, embraced
by strange cool, bumping into peers, everyone weeping.
Hands gently peel back your skin, a sound sighs
surprised pleasure in your silken flesh, nerves a net
holding seeds. Sheer exposure. The air receives
your glistening. Listen to the silence of your new body,
tucked into a pocket window, saved for some future
feast in which every living being is your guest.
2011
he even changed the way we grieve
we waited all night
for our network lives to load
while the world sighed Steve
electrically,
touching screens, the space between
our thumbs, widening
6 October 2011
two days (and you still haven’t put up the tomatoes)
When you’ve shredded five zucchini,
for sixteen loaves of bread,
When you’ve wrestled the machine
to snake the clot you dread,
When you’ve folded all the laundry,
graded papers, sighed and read,
When you’ve dusted all the shelves
and through lone hours, bled,
When you’ve walked the limping dog,
changed the sheets of your sweet bed,
rest in it.
2011
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