poems by rachel kellum
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Poem for Wilma Mankiller
The entire family rolled chaos
To have a pure prayer.
I tried death, felt its gift
As the woman who lived before,
The woman who lives afterward.
Steady.
To the mailbox, onto the ground,
Grapefruit, pencil, hairbrush,
Toothbrush, vision of fingers,
Hands, arms, throat, water,
Forty pounds, nose, eyes.
Closed, my existence.
I broke, breathing death,
Absolutely still.
My God! That is what I have!
A good mind.
2016
A found poem from her biography, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People, pages 226-229
Renku with Puncture Vine
Goat-heads stick in my rubber soles.
The feral cat follows me too close.
I trip, lose a shoe, foot a pin cushion
Of porcupine quills
Screaming rock lyrics to the stars.
Can you hear me?
Can you feel me?
Shall I poke you harder?
I wipe my soles on the mat outside.
Later, in the mudroom, my lover groans, “Ouch!”
by
Rachel Kellum
Timmy Fritzler
Dorell Drake
Someday I Will Love Rachel Kellum
When your father no longer remembers you,
you will leap from his forgiven salty head—
idea he never had—and try on that small body,
one he didn’t make. You will be born too soon.
Overdue, you will gather your own new nakedness.
You will stare into your own huge eyes
and take a milkless milk from yourself, two
suns will rise over the earth of your own breast.
You will laugh at your perfect toes, such tiny peas,
pretend to gobble them before you stand,
try them out, take your first wobbled step,
catch yourself, straighten up, release.
2016
with thanks to Ocean Vuong for the title
Cold Storage
Store your hearts in the cellar
Packed in cool, damp sand. Don’t worry.
They’ll last. Grow dozens with an ancient sun.
You can’t eat your hearts out all at once.
Let frost kiss their shoulders every fall
Before you pull them. Leave the clinging dirt.
Eat the nicked and bruised ones first
Lest they spoil the rest with rot.
Work your way through the toughened stash
Smallest to largest by each winter’s end,
Compost whatever withered ones are left,
Except for the hearts you’ve saved, still firm,
For cancer’s next off-season call,
Small lungs drowned in meconium tar,
Beloved lost in plots of self–harvest,
Your father’s final disregard: death.
2016
Learning to Spin
for Tammy
No one who loves her, who enters
a room where she sits, can tell her no.
She will teach you how to spin.
Here is the Turkish drop spindle.
Here is the antique wheel.
“Do not be afraid,” she says, holds out
her daughter’s first skein. “Everyone
hates their first attempts,” she grins,
“but they are the best, so sweetly uneven.”
“Yes,” I say, “Imperfectly perfect—wabi sabi.”
Sitting with her, best friend of my girlhood,
our bond unscathed by years or roads or men,
we are suddenly ancient women, a lineage,
drawing out soft fibers with our fingers,
grieving teenage children living out of reach.
Such wool so easy to pull apart when loose,
so strong when stretched and spun,
unbreakable, the two of us make mother yarn,
spool it onto arms of whorls, one under,
two over, giddy, grateful for the art of plying.
2016
Town Cat Turns
For two years
after the bewildering move
she refused to step outside,
claimed the upper floor,
shed upon beds
before farm house windows.
Not without a fight
I finally tossed her out
summer’s back door.
An intervention.
She ran low
to barns and shadows,
beneath parked cars.
Tom cats took her in,
taught her night-joy,
the stealthy prowl,
naps in caves of weeds,
field mice in the chicken house.
Gone wild four weeks
without a bowl, still fat,
she asked to be let in,
more herself than
all the years before,
her new face praising
our feet and shins
and doors.
2015
second place winner of the Mildred Vorpahl Baass Award in the National Federation of State Poetry Societies Contest, in the 2016 NFSPS anthology, Encore
Reclaiming Conversation
For maybe a hundred thousand years or more, grownups have been waving tangles of string in their children’s faces... no wonder kids grow up crazy. Kurt Vonnegut
Your stories circle her question
before you answer it.
Lean in. Over the café table,
make a cat’s cradle of your life.
With your eyes, ask to pass it.
See if she can fit her fingers
into crisscrossed plots
of who you were before —
Carefully Reasoned Infidelities,
Halted Hungry Ghost Trajectories,
Genuine Anti-Heroine Epiphanies—
and in the passing, make candles,
diamonds of the yarn. She too leans.
Your lover/mother/poet motives
written, stricken, timidly revised,
you hope the tangled page does not
rewrite the you she likes.
2016
with thanks to Barbara
How Could You?
The pot-bellied prairie sky takes off
Its red ball cap, white hair blown awry,
To press its forehead against the window.
Blue eyes squint under cupped hands,
Glare, How could you?
The miscegenists are busy in the kitchen.
I, bro-ho, coalburner, stand at the sink
With a dishwand over a pan.
Hard water encrusts the faucet
With its old song: traitor, traitor.
I don’t hear it. My ears white
As rusted lime scale. Two feet away,
A black man slices blue cheese
On a cutting board. He’s good with a knife.
Figgers, grunts the sky.
We, both quiet at our tasks,
Faces set in peace, mundane attention,
Bare feet bless scuffed linoleum
Of a white farmhouse with a long history
And crumbling foundation.
He lays down the knife.
Perhaps because I glance over
And smile at the symmetric pile of cheese
We bought under fluorescent lights
At the small town local grocery,
Or perhaps because the prairie sky
Is no old man or god peeping, he slips
Behind me, wraps summer-darkened arms
Around my waist. I stop scrubbing
To rest in the blue sky of our miscegenation.
2016