poems by rachel kellum
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Colorado Calixta
Outside the world
is every shade
of lazy
white.
My blinds are always
drawn
but not
this Christo
night.
I want
to wake in my
white bed
inside
white
walls
And revel
as a seam
of red where
warm
blood calls.
Outside the world
is every shade
of lazy
white.
My blinds are always
drawn
but not
this Christo
night.
I want
to wake in my
white bed
inside
white
walls
And revel
as a seam
of red where
warm
blood calls.
Outside the world
is every shade
of lazy
white.
My blinds are always drawn
but not
this Christo
night.
I want
to wake in my
white bed
inside white
walls
And revel
as a seam
of red where
warm
blood calls.
Skype’s First Double Jalus
Someday I will be sitting
And you will be sitting
Inside our respective screens
After years watching sound
Move each other’s mouths,
Two mirrors in infant mimicry,
With nothing more to say.
I will laugh when your yellow belt
Finally drops an empty knot
Where your waist used to be
And let my hair fall
A loose headless pile
On lettered keys.
for Geshe Yungdrung Gyaltsen, my English student and Dharma teacher
Small Atmospheres
Light lifts water
Off a parking lot.
Clouds on slick concrete.
Air apparent.
Left to right
Whips white speed.
Then still.
Then not.
Stratus swell.
Cirrus gust.
This chest, wet lot.
You, yellow heat.
2013
72 Degrees
Unlikely snow patch
Hunched in grasses’ slim shadows,
Slip off your white coat.
2013
Guest poet: Geshe Yungdrung Gyaltsen
Flowers prostrate sky.
Clouds pride in it all hiding.
Cried then leaves were fresh.
2013
Two Women, Confluence
Two women, confluence
Of unplanned red, hungry,
Eat the same veggie wrap,
Laugh garlic in pedicabs
Along ribbons of sidewalk
Where night has eaten
Half the moon and
Skyscrapers break the rest
Into four shining cloves.
Red whirling women remind
Whole rooms of their feet.
Dancing men confess
In practiced accents, stolen
Beat, they even taste
The garlic in the air.
2013
Aequorea Victoria
Our memory—
Skin water skin
—Translating me:
Wind throat sea hips
Suspended bloom
Of jelly fish.
2013
Where Does It Come From, Stay and Go?
Go find your mind,
the men tell the boys.
The boys search for days, weeks, months—
return with a fist-sized stone, the tale
of a bird, point to the heart.
With kind eyes, the men say,
Go look again. The boys do.
One has to earn the losing
of one’s own mind.
It is not like here where we read it first
in books and lie with certainty:
The mind is nowhere.
Here, it takes years
to lose these words.
2013
The Fourth
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together.
~T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”
Today I am the morning man
Who shovels through my snowy walk.
That night, the woman shadow-shoveled
In the warm-crushed rowing dark:
Two hunched thinkers, lovers, clutched
At light’s raked progress over flesh
While two shame-shades slipped from
The scene, dry hands in cold pockets.
Myriad distant darkstars, earthshine
Scratched up by the waxing moon
Begged to be that dim streetlight,
Watching what bright shadows do.
2013