poems by rachel kellum
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because iphones are poems, and i held yours
i want to slide my thumbs
across the screen of you, outward, opening
and opening into hidden windows, rolling
vistas and whispered songs where secret codes linger:
username: hauntingly_familiar@crestone.com
password: hello_ my god
intuitively, i would go.
in one window there would be space
for us to sing and spread
hot sauce across the lips
of countless tacos, abolishing hunger.
in another: the crimson heart of desert fields
with no roads and a waning gibbous morning
moon promising more than future fullness.
i would glide into and through the
labyrinthine libraries of your mind,
run my fingers down electric spine upon spine,
and never tire, invite you into mine,
already you’ve found the door in,
my margins awaiting your eyes.
click shrine and find adorned dakini breasts,
bejeweled beneath thangkas
of majestic blue cocks
dancing in flame, blaming no one
for too much attachment, allowing longing.
further in: a room of beds with singing springs
no one would hear but us, springs shrieking,
screaming wild with our choked breath
and shocked eyes and golden light beaming
shooting, streaming from pores, and more.
more, there would be more places
than we can fathom from this place
where massive indifferent thumbs
of circumstance slide inward
and inward across you, across me, across
a bench by a moonlit stupa, receding,
receding, the print too small to read,
my thumbs too small to reach the screen,
farther away than my hips can comprehend
circumambulating the memory of your hands,
turning and turning toward you, this heart
looking for your gentle thumbs,
but the sky, abundantly prudent,
has swallowed you whole.
2008
featured in Slow Trains, 2008
You may
~after Adrienne Rich
You may be reading this poem in your white robes,
having walked the street of your mosque smiling,
still reeling after the muscled man on a motorcycle
yelled, “Go back to your own fucking country!”
You will not wear your white robes on the street again.
You may be reading this poem in a community college
classroom, texting under the table to your mother
at home smoking meth, and you are worried
she will become you before you become this poem.
You may be reading this poem on a screen
after smoothing a Romney sticker on your garage refrigerator,
dreaming of fags falling off the San Andreas fault.
You may be reading this poem next to your sleeping lover
whose breasts spread differently than yours, empty.
The book sits on your chest. Words fall and lift. She stirs.
You may be reading this poem years after leaving
your children, and you know these lines will never heal them.
You may be reading this poem instead of praying
to a wifeless god, unable to sleep, too old for a young love.
The words keep you awake, black needles stitching
us all together, we who don’t belong to each other.
2012
Bioluminescence
My son’s best friend skewered wasps
on shish kabob sticks I bought
to mark rows of seeds in my garden.
I judged his proud pronouncement,
forgetting luciferase, Illinois lightning bugs
whose glow I smeared across my night face,
joyfully certain they could live without it.
2012
Consorts
I’m jealous of monks.
It’s true.
I want to be one,
but I suppose
with breasts
and one void too many
I can be only a nun.
We all can play the skull damaru.
But I want to be with you
in the monastery
where all the teachers live,
singing songs like a baritone hive,
reading ancient texts,
bumping together our bald heads.
Forget the sewing.
In the courtyard
when we debate,
point after point
I will clap my hands
like dry lightning
until we both wake up.
Ha! Ha!
I will paint thangkas,
give buddhas your blue eyes,
but don’t make me
your peripheral, cutting dakini
unless you’ll be mine.
We could take turns being the metaphor,
the center of shrines.
A necklace of heads.
2012
Walking the Burn
Here the roots blew,
sent milk quartz flying.
And here quartz fields are untouched,
surrounded by a ring of char.
I want to say my love is quartz with no reason
for what is spared but wind and water.
Everywhere are black skeletons
of juniper, more beautiful stripped and stark.
They’ll stand a hundred years.
Nothing will eat them. They don’t rot.
I want to say each one
is a word in my hardest love story.
Here is the ancient ponderosa in its black skin and arms,
hope already drilled from its massive trunk.
The flow beneath singed bark bleeds sweet sap.
Though needles on high are green, it won’t survive.
I want to say its beetles
are my apologies.
Here is where wild grasses stopped
burning. Step over the amazing line.
What burned a month ago is now
greener than what was saved.
I want to say that field is my face
before and after you.
2012
Lament of the Carefully Undressed
Cotton capris slide off legs
and stand up low on the wooden floor,
two perfectly crumpled empty columns,
waiting to be stepped into like a morning
in which she wakes alone,
no clothes thrown off like sighs
in small sleeping heaps with his.
2012
The Book
Rachel Kellum's first chapbook, ah, is now available at Liquid Light Press.
What others are saying about ah:
"With lush language and vivid lyric, Rachel Kellum explores the many folds of silence—such sweet paradox! These are poems that open us, creating whole meadows in the mind. Intuitive, vulnerable, and surprisingly funny, ah invites us to slough our own layers and lean into quietude."
~Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Miracle Already Happening and Holding Three Things at Once and Poet Laureate of San Miguel County, Colorado (2007-2011)
"Rachel Kellum's volume, ah, embodies precisely what its title promises. In these poems the author plays words against silence not only in sense, as emphasized by the very first poem "Where Words Wait," but also in sound. She works in phrases that seem carefully measured for the breath, and which both connect to and depart from preceding phrases in a way that left me catching my breath. The poems compel the reader to seek an unlashing of the mind from superficial concerns, and to enjoy the resulting excursions, accepting the awkwardness when you return to focus on the corporeal, as in "Waking Into Sleep, Take Your Waking Slow." The poems are airy and playful, supporting the relaxation they propose. Though these poems emerged from a particular year's Buddhist meditation practice, they are commended by the author in the afterword not only to "Buddhist practitioners, but also anyone interested in engaging with the rich space of their own awareness." Indeed the spiritual message in these poems is quite subtle and accessible, with the exception of "Sutra For Poets Who Would Be Buddhas," where the author clearly had to get a few matters off her chest in order to ease back into the breathing. Even this brief turn in tone underscores the honesty of the collection overall. There are a few places in the poems where my ear was brought out of its ease by choices in word or phrase, but such is the effect of the whole that even such minor technical objections did not prevent my enjoyment of this volume, did not shatter the promised ah!"
~Uche Ogbuji, poetry editor of The Nervous Breakdown
"Rachel Kellum is a fine poet. Her lines dazzle, racing quicksilver across the page. But this book is less about craft's elegant spigot and more the slow burn of shared realizations. From deep in her practice, Kellum's poems walk barefoot over perfection's hot embers, igniting the lyric kindling in us."
~ Art Goodtimes, Poet Laureate of Colorado's Western Slope
"In this beautiful group of poems, Rachel Kellum becomes her meditation practice lab. She allows herself to feel vulnerable, and undo many of the usual modes of thinking. In fact, she connects, through the wonderful Bonpo Dzogchen teachings from Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, to her inner space, struggling with silence and the expressions of sound and words that manifest from it, and allows these writings to come as metaphors of her meditation experience. Sometimes she finds herself shining, other times entangled with her own words and thoughts. An honest account of her meditation practice, especially when she can look without bias between breaths. Among Rachel's many wonderful words, I stay with these: Dry your tears. It isn't in books. It is you. Sit….Then you become the sky book you read."
~Alejandro Chaoul, author, international meditation instructor, Director of Research at Ligmincha Institute
Matilde Urrutia
Neruda made of her fields of wheat,
earthen ware of her hidden body,
a lifetime of bread loaves.
Against him, always small,
but large enough to hold
his sea, his sea, his peopled sea,
large enough to chew and chew
and lodge in his small, hungry teeth.
2012