poems by rachel kellum
to comment ✒️ click on a title
On Screen
While a six- and thirteen-year-old discuss the ethics
of killing each other on screen, make promises,
apologies, and qualify accidental violences
that do occur in the making and mining
of worlds, I sit with my own little dyings,
have the same conversation in my body—
proud publisher of love and self-loathing,
only remotely committed to saving the girl—
dodge my own darts and flames, leap oil
barrels and blind panic snakes, share the battle
with a blank screen where it becomes more real,
becomes words that never heal me completely
but itch and stretch like my three favorite scars,
softened, shrunken, and often forgotten.
2015
Beauty and You, My Son
for Grey
I wish always to be
In some dark theatre
Where the orchestra swells
To carry your voice on its shoulders,
Raising up the love of a Beast
Turned boy-faced man.
2015
The Myth of Singing Legs
On this day of the dead we found a cricket in a classroom on its back, hind legs spread impossibly perpendicular to its body, the transept of its personal cruciform cathedral. Smaller legs wriggled like Gregor Samsa’s that famous morning in bed, helpless, thinking only of duty, not the dreadful exoskeleton. Sleeping through our alarm, unrecognizable to ourselves, we find ways to roll out, open double doors to our lives with our mouths if we must. Again. Again. But not this cricket. I collected it on a scrap of newspaper print, tossed it under a cottonwood where it was buried by November wind. Brittle leaves the shape of hearts or spades scraped serrated edges on the sidewalk, an homage to the myth of singing legs.
2015
Song of the Longhorn Cowfish
Mysterious calcified fish,
Morbid object of the curious,
Your horned brow
Furrowed in halted effort,
Never more a forward swimmer,
Your mouth is a hole of song:
O! It comes to this!
From skiff of a watery reef
To slick of a faux wood table.
Poets, kiss my hexagonal skin.
Gaze into the sockets of my skull.
Swim into your own indignity.
2015
Questions for the Bell
Who forged you in the slaving time?
Who caught the wax of memory when it fell?
How many have you woken with your clang?
Were you ever full of desperation’s wine?
What battles did your death toll pound?
Whose oily hands have traced your madeleine?
In your calm, did dying soldiers hear the owl?
Did Whitman sob relief upon your final knell?
2015
Kaleidoscope
Behold the shifting
mandala of your wooden thoughts.
Don’t be fooled
by craftsmanship, the glinting shards.
Arrange yourself
as radiating stars upon each turn.
Press your hands
upon your own eyes. Hard!
Watch the lights
of your blooded mind explode.
2015
October Elegy
For my student, Nate Osburn
When fall fell, so did you.
We were not ready for the drop,
The sudden parallel.
The leaves of all your papers, crisp,
Cling still to autumn limbs
Like dreams of your green mind.
Yellow-tinged I gather them
From deep inside the screens.
From wind and loss,
Rake gorgeous piles of words
That were and weren’t you,
But, ever after, worlds.
Your pages now the only places
Left to pause and play
In thought with you—
Brave you who flat refused
Personified paradox,
You for whom the human mind
Was always god enough
Yet never god.
And wasn’t yours a brilliant,
Kindly, honest one.
2015
Annual Work Plan
The year is not a hill.
Push the annual work plan
Aside. Due Friday.
Fill in blanks of travel forms.
Attach receipts with paper clips.
Think meals in terms of per diem.
Not sushi, sake, miso, friends.
Forget the empty gestures
Of distant conferences.
Count miles. Cash in.
Circle words and numbers
On sixteen rubrics.
Learning must be proven
To students
And bottom-line feeders
For whom it is not enough
To assess light in one’s own
Or others’ eyes.
Out here in the dark,
Everything measured,
Ferried for a price.
Your ____________.
Fill in the blank.
Scribble conversations
In margins and hope
Against arms.
Time ticks. More work.
More work. More work.
The to-do list self-goading.
The state mule self-loading.
Note how time erodes.
Note how quickly, how often
It rings: the digital singing bowl
Of Thich Nhat Hahn.
The app you, overloaded,
Downloaded for fun, for free,
A precious boat,
Set to chime about every hour
(Programmed unpredictability)
To wake you out of mire.
When it sounds you pause
One moment to own
Your skin, your silence,
Vast mother holding the stream
Of your moving mind hands.
One second, maybe two,
You close your eyes.
No desk, no screen,
No mechanical pencil.
No end to desk, to screen,
To mechanical pencil.
Ease back in. Submerge.
Open-eyed. Swim.
Breathe beneath surfaces.
Newly gilled. Remember.
Work inside you
Without space is a stone.
2015
You're/I'm
You’re parakeet.
I’m hummingbird.
This means nothing to nectar.
I’m milk thistle.
You’re tomato bloom.
Let’s build boxes for bees.
You’re cast iron.
I’m stainless steel.
Who knew the earth could cook?
I’m Russian olive.
You’re cottonwood.
Don’t believe in trash trees.
You’re snare crescendo.
I’m cello smoke.
Song is sung by silence.
I’m camera.
You’re handheld mirror.
Bedtime burns our selfies.
You’re lost button.
I’m tarnished dime.
Whose deep pocket is this?
2015