poems by rachel kellum
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Tavern Tattoos: A Communion
Sitting here in my old drawings,
every one carefully clothed,
I watch braver, bare arms
fold across chests,
raise boisterous hellos over heads,
stretch wide and slow to find
an old lover’s full-sleeve embrace.
His three of swords in her poppy field.
Her ravens clawing his cross.
He buys her a beer.
Their pulses retrace
the sharp, blue story
of love fading,
lost in new needled filigree.
Skin pictures never stop breaching
their own boundaries,
whispering like prisoners,
raised like braille for the unblind,
like prayers no gods but eyes
and hands can hear.
So many gods! Even still,
such prayers often go
unanswered.
November 2012
Curriculum Vitae
I don’t want to tell you
about my happiness,
but listen: I’ve just drunk
rain drops that fell
into my cold Earl Grey,
and the fire-cooled
propane refrigerator
and the wind-cooled
direct current inverter
have just now healed
into self-regulation
after many stop
and start days,
despite the fact
that we gave up on both
last night to kiss
slowly and sleep
when our laptop movie,
Off the Map,
whirred to fade.
Pixels and alternating
currents are easy
to trade for living lips.
Likewise, it is easy
to let wind blow,
to care less
about pages,
my curriculum vitae.
Leonard Cohen said poetry
is just the ash,
evidence of a life
burning well.
Today my ash
is in the wind.
The final wash
of rain has very little
to say.
2013
Breech Birth
Moving out of knowing well,
I moved death into me.
Fed it my home, my poems, my name,
my titles, my children’s security.
I clawed its mouth, crawled down its throat,
snatched up the swallowed tree.
Too far gone, the house spun off—
yellow, light rooms empty.
Death pulled me out of myself by my legs.
Smoothed my hair. Smelled me.
2013
Small and Home
Thrill stirring particles,
gods in fat sky wonder.
(Our happy owl murmurs
of tiny waters and window eyes.)
When our wild family plunges
night, we blossom immense.
Sing yes, we sob, foreverly,
terrifyingly small and home.
2013
Chicken Literal
I am a chicken
With its head cut off.
Watch me bleed.
Don’t bother throwing seeds
Down my neck.
I’m beyond eating.
Now I’m all about
Feet and fleeing.
Flopping useless wings,
Staining feathers
Really nothing more
Than a broken promise
From my broken
Shelled beginning.
Laughing children
Chase me around the yard
Until I fall in the weeds.
I watch them
With my beady eyes
From the sticky block.
The hatchet sun, raised,
For years, aiming.
Take it from me:
You won’t see it drop.
2013
Even Then She Knew
“I no monkey! I balloon!” ~Sage Magdelene, age two
My sweet monkey.
My orange balloon.
She blazes with summer
Wind and yellow truth.
Her red wings roar.
2013
My Mothers Wait For Their Belated Mother’s Day Poem
Charlotte to Charlotte says,
“Watch. This week she will buy seed bread
and do five loads of laundry instead.”
Laura Matilda and Irene Genevieve know:
“But after straightening two sofa pillows,
her words will grow like dust on the piano.”
Margaret Madeline whispers to Wanda Margaret,
“But first she will nibble dark chocolate
hidden in the kitchen towel drawer, I bet.”
Folded, uncluttered, sweet, alone, the poem comes.
The mothers hum two hundred years of grief-love
one month before my daughter, with her name, leaves home.
2013
Spectral Bodies
Somewhere between
Ape and alien we spin
Back to back, awkward
Spindly circle of arms.
We dance the blind axle
Of space. It has no body.
We turn seeking the other
With the oldest eyes
We can muster, primate,
Gape-mouthed with sight.
Our ancient brows jut
Wonder, lean far back
To touch. Before losing
Whatever footing spinning
Allows, our crowns
Make a bridge. A body
Crosses—light, love, dark—
Bigger than we are.
It doesn’t need legs
To travel very, very far.
2013
Calculating a New Vocabulary of Joy
We multiply families of ravens,
stun words in cool gusts,
then lift, winged heat. I ramble
mathematically, waiting for a language,
croaking, ready to give up everything tertiary.
What primal number,
what rough cut square footage
expresses itself in our shared gaze?
What equals one mountain plus one man plus one woman
plus three habaneros sliced thinly, coughing steam,
sex and gasoline, gratitude dividing
into soft apologies to one tree for sinking nails
to hold prayer flags and all sentient beings?
How do two people become
one home in a flash? Quite simply.
The sky calculates it all like this:
One crisp ponderosa accepts you. I notice.
We sniff its neck. The moon squints
through its 2 am limbs upon our tangled sleep.
One cabin, our larger body, stirs
under twenty fingers. Its engine spills and fumes.
One decomposing granite hallway
takes our four-legged gait like seed,
grunts us new. Like this, teeth smiling.
We might be two parallel streams and the earth
is giving way between.
We can’t account rationally for the speed
of our lives’ glorious destruction
or the volume of water tearing through.
The solution is in the weep, the wound,
the rocky crack. Guess how
the clever juniper grew where it grew.
2013