poems by rachel kellum
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Super Moon
When the moon comes up
it doesn’t care about my mantras.
When the moon comes up
it doesn’t think about the egg it will become.
When the moon comes up
I ignore the crackling fire I built to celebrate it.
Well Up
In 1677, Leeuwenhoek scooped his joy
from a woman and leapt from bed.
“Before six beats of the pulse [had] passed,”
his microscope revealed a swell of sperm
damning the dry edge
of their pressed liquid world.
* * * *
La Rana clings to grasses on the shore,
yellow eyes following flies.
* * * *
Impenetrable paths, impenetrable paths,
the seeds of El Melon whisper until
someone cracks the rind.
* * * *
Is all a practice in welling up?
* * * *
I stand in the high desert
with an emerald umbrella.
* * * *
La Maceta breaks open,
roots too hungry for terra cotta.
* * * *
Giant blueprints of poems spill out.
Rewrite the ends.
* * * *
Judyth says,
Make sandstone altars to the ordinary!
Dig up, display your bones, your rusty implements!
* * * *
Leap from the dry edge!
2016
after Family Matters
“Family Matters” by Alexandra de Kempf
Birth dates sprout from our heads
As lottery numbers. Fill in the holes.
Shrug at losing the upper range.
Luck is luck and winning could be
As easy as family love
And the array of digits
Ancients assigned to days
To mark our arrivals, departures
And fortunes like spirals.
Perhaps the history of humanity
Is ruled by golden ratios
Of hermit shells, phallic risings
Of red flamingo flowers,
Lineages of human bodies spinning outward,
Spaceward, 3-D DNA. Forget ladders.
Are you a ladder?
Has your health been hammered?
Is your sight obscured
By capital’s metastasis, brain blossoming
Cancer’s white words: not enough
Morphing into more, more? What’s eating you?
The writing is on the wall.
We’ve stopped reaching for each other,
Prohibited by policies banning touch
Learned by clicking state screens.
Print your HR certificate, file for proof.
Instead, we point, mouths wide, teeth bared
Not quite laughing, perhaps shocked
Or screaming. Do you know a rich man’s body
From his stack of bloody books?
Or her Universal Perfect Breasts from fruit
Or the font of bottles?
Don’t nurse. He owns you.
Gift your kids strange teddy bears
He sells so they can sleep alone.
Nestle in with Ambien.
Get six hours for work. Hope for eight.
Let them cry it out in the dark.
Soon they’ll need only a phone,
A silken screen, a monthly plan
To stay in touch.
Don’t bother counting years
Before your children go.
They fall away like leaves,
Lost lottery tickets
You forgot to cash in.
Magnetic Poem Four
We haunt
Clean farm scent
Winter-soon stars
Little nests
Sky bound animals
Familiar pumpkin
Love bird inside
My kind of castle
2016
Growing Legs
You lost what you called freedom in the lightning strike
Of conception. Cells split for months until you split,
Pushing the fleshy proof of interdependence out
From between streaked legs that could not
Walk away nor deny the tiny mouths of otherness,
The need to pour yourself into helplessness
Personified in bodies that broke off, broke out
Of yours, freed into air. Despite the erroneous belief
You nurtured in your early twenties—everyone
Is responsible for only themselves—you let your body
Teach you something new about love. This is what
Happens when you have grown six legs inside. Freedom
Returns when they, in turn, walk away from you
For good, and you can’t stop shedding. One day you do.
You almost start believing you have only one heart.
2016
Vigil
“They All Slept Here” by Ilenia Pezzaniti
Our bed is not stained with droplets
of old blood. There is no chair on which
to prop an Impressionist print
of two ladies walking away with parasols,
nor antique TV pixels jealous of their stillness.
We have no faux wood headboard.
Our room is no hotel or photo.
A blue, white and green
painting hangs over our heads,
large with trying to be water and air
and the space between,
as though three elements could be
simple color and their memory enough
to soothe me in the dark on clean sheets.
Startled awake, my pulse believes
you are the man on screen
stranded in the middle of a road
walking away from death,
helicopter hovering overhead,
disembodied voice seeing just enough
of size and skin to summarize you.
Any move you make to reach for phone,
I.D., risks your body’s claim
to blue, white and green.
No last text I’m on my way.
From above, at dusk, we don’t know
if the pixelated bloom on your shirt
is black or red.
I blink in the dark.
I can’t see you.
You breathe, refuse screens.
Pressed against your heat,
I let you sleep.
2016
for the family of Terence Crutcher
Renku with Plums
Five plums on three tables,
Six poets hunch over pens
To start their renku
My pen shakes with fear
The silence calms these thorns
My voice echoes in harmony
But the words are garbled
And confusion reigns
A storm blows in from the west
Thunder and wind shake us
Shatter of tree trunk
Now even the breath is old
The end comes too soon
But the middle blooms hyacinth and rose
Aspen embrace and feed each other
Their roots hold hands deep in the earth
Send up new-barked bodies
That bears mark with claws
That laces eyes with scars
Steadily willing to see
Seeing is overrated
Sometimes it is good
To close eyes and be
Ears bring in the news
Delicate and slender or wide and wild
If good news, beware,
As bad news is hiding somewhere
If bad news, cheer, good news is near
Your dear hide and tan
Hide beneath life’s skin
The skin of this plum
Is already dreaming of teeth
It wants to know its inner color
(Made at Ziggies Poetry Festival, July 2016, with Jimi Bernath, Valerie Szarek, James Steele, Cathy Casper, and a woman whose name escapes me, my apologies. Learn more about the Renku form here.)
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