poems by rachel kellum
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Christmas Soup
A bag of fifteen kinds of dried beans hid beneath
the box of lasagna noodles all year, maybe two.
Christmas came without kids. Month-old steaks
of ham, for which no one could make room
thanks to turkey, had begun bearding with frost
in the freezer. Why not use them? Dorell suggested
we also throw the ham hock in. I did.
After two and a half hours simmering, the soup
blushed a shade richer than the anemic tan
of Campbell’s Bean with Bacon—the solitary soup
of my youth, my once secret pleasure, slurping alone
over the kitchen table when Mom wasn’t home to cook.
This new color, a quiet victory. The texture, sigh worthy.
Scent of independence. No can opener dripping by the sink.
Handfuls of carrots and onions, two cloves of garlic
and thirty minutes later, the ham fell apart in our mouths.
No salt or pepper required. No special herbs in the broth.
Just water, a forgotten bag of beans and a remembered
gilt pig named Shirley who walked the ramp alone
into the trailer with no human prodding, silent, while I sat
quiet in the house across the field, listening for her,
praying, shedding salt, softening my flesh for some future
feast in which I surely will be no longer guest but course.
2015
Three Bodies in Six Realms Collage, 2013
Three Bodies in Six Realms, Collage, 2013
Some friends once gave me 30 years worth of National Geographic magazines. A couple years ago, I finally put a few of them to use. This is my first attempt at old fashioned collage using an Xacto knife and glue.
Sentences for Mothers
Tell me how long you rusted underground, your five links remembering the iron chain you once completed, before a mother dug you out of the garden.
She dreamed you could nourish a soup.
Let me go, her son once yelled on the dark highway, holding the loose end of her chain in his own hands.
*
Tell me, mothers of the four winds, to which direction blows your voice?
Where have I heard that sound before? Through old windows? A child’s train?
I blow my own wind through a whistle made of many women.
*
Where is my other half, the clam shell wonders, half a world away from the Spanish beach my daughter walked 12 years ago.
O, Venus, throw her back to me!
*
Behind the molded drywall of the old bathroom: a faded photo of a girl in a cotton collared dress and braids, discarded razor blades, the carcasses of birds who lost their way.
Never have I worn a dress hand sewn and pressed by my own mother.
*
A Kenyan woman gave her daughter bracelets, hand-beaded in blue, black and pearlescent seeds, a prayer for her wrists as she crossed the Atlantic.
At what moment did the girl, now grown, decide to give them to me?
2015
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