poems by rachel kellum
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Her Death
There was no lightning to announce
Her death, though her eyes shot wide
And clear into a sun we couldn’t see.
Freed from sight, she did not squint.
In unison our heads fell back, wailing
Like Picasso’s horse, having just lost
The quiet war. There was no exit sign
In the upper corner of the room.
Her name never flashed in lights
To celebrate the way she moved like water
Wheeling her IV, saint in a loosely tied sheet,
Old child playing a bare-assed ghost.
When she floated away, her body
A cold stone, we too were stones
Swallowed by a lost river
Rubbing us small and smooth.
2014
Barnyard Light the Professor
Please have your fingers prepared
To take notes in the dirt.
Even though the moon,
Sharper than I, distracts you,
Pretend to be writing.
Today we will discuss hyperbole.
Consider yourselves, crouched there
Like clocks. Your long darkness—
An arm counting eternity.
2014
Hippocampus
Our seahorse
unbound
from steady center
bled a slow sound
like low blood sugar.
Sad to be found
in loss, we hum
with the singing wound,
tails clinging.
2014
Barnyard Light the Brother
Though half-joking you
Call me the murder light,
The murderer lurks
In your own masked skull.
I’m only half sorry my shine
Skips your shade helter skelter
When the barn’s darkest thought
Out-paces your heart
And your stomach thrills
Safe at the farmhouse door.
2014
Barnyard Light the Poet
I write illegible poems with shadows I cast
Over scrambled coyote and rabbit tracks.
I cannot hear the eerie yips and blood squeal,
But see the mouths, two kinds of many ears
Cast up toward the moon, my deaf mother,
Whose endless crawling shadows shudder.
2014
On Her Choice of Orange Home Décor
Her:
Are you gonna hate this?
Him:
Only if you leave me.
2014
Vitreous Body
When the pasture has just become
The smallest green promise, a pleasure
For patient rabbits, walk far into it.
Lie down on your back. Do not think
Of soiling your coat in the wet.
It is water. It is making you glass
Looking up so far. Beyond floaters
In your eyes, the sky is a blue field
For dancing sparks, and you,
Still and vitreous as you are,
Are the green, the sparks, the sky
Turning slowly in a space so large
It has no name so has stolen yours.
2014
Ars Poetica
When Lou Reed died, the raven told me:
Toss the empty chambered thirty-eight
Into the red blender with a bruised Peruvian mango.
Blend on high speed. Break the blender.
Drink the poem, sweet and sharp, a threat.
It will grow in you like a landslide. Bury
the living, exhume the dead, the raven said.
She never shuts up, pelts: no one survived
The flight, so write, as if this horrible news
Is a foil thing to stash like treasure or trash.
Orion hunts the nest with arrow pen.
And Tapihritsa, upon attaining rainbow body
Didn’t bother sniffing the pits of his abandoned robes.
He didn’t say a thing about the new Snow White,
Or snow, or white, or Lou Reed’s raven scarf,
Or any of the missing dead. All is all he said.
Thus my work is cut. I will replicate Amor
And Psyche’s melting jalus strokes with my life.
I will drink water like a witch and spit words
Like broken teeth. The teeth will say two things:
One. You didn’t have to move. Rest. It is best
To be still without leaning on anything else.
Two. Rest the word against anything.
Your emptiness is not the only medicine.
2014
NaPoWriMo: Write A Poem A Day for National Poetry Month
It's my favorite month for so many reasons. Spring. My birthday. National Poetry Month. Last year was grueling writing a poem a day, but I've committed to trying again. I think I missed a couple days last April when I fell in love. Still in love. Still writing.