poems by rachel kellum
to comment ✒️ click on a title
In Her Dominion
Hecate crisscrosses
Milky deserts
Of wrinkled mythos,
Humus crumbles
From her shoes.
Ancient archivist,
She plucks a whisker
From her chin to write
The rascally world.
2017
Ekphrasis on a Lost Image
Two flowers.
Two birds.
Two women.
Two flying squirrels.
One man.
He makes his maps,
Translates hope for legs
Into one black wing.
The counted and named
Look away,
Avoid his gaze.
Too late—
He has already made
Himself a feathered God,
And the world: a woman full
Of twins
Who will destroy him.
2017
Never Not in the Middle
On little couch, I’m tight between
my youngest son and Love.
There’s the obvious:
Earth and sun.
I’ve been between a cabin
And Salida twenty years.
Wandering a sagebrush dream
Between abstract and concrete.
Incision and Death.
Prairie fog, white Leadville breath.
Mope and door.
Silence and the ringing ear.
Empty freezer,
Black boar.
Speckled hen,
running cow.
Now.
2017
Marriages
1
I dreamt the white dress standing in front of a mirror
With my perfect man who would soon read the letter
I wrote him when I was 16 in Young Women’s class
At church in which I promised purity and to be
Temple worthy. We would learn our real names.
The mirror behind us would reflect the mirror before us,
Our faces would recede into infinity. We would learn
The secrets of godhood together. Populate worlds.
2
Pregnant, I wore a dusty rose dress on a mountain
His mother almost died climbing. He slid the ring
Jagged with peaks on my finger, said, “With this ring
I hold you forever.” Terrified at such solidity, I replied,
With Zuni water ring, “Please wear this token
Of my love, constant and changing as the ocean.”
One morning, a year later, I woke and the tide
Had gone too far out. I left him on land.
3
We wore only our hair and braided two long strands
Of it together, cut with a knife under the tree
Where our son was born the year before.
We put the braid in a leather bag with our children’s
Fingernails, my milk, a raven claw. Love medicine.
Inexorable drift. When he moved out, he took the knife
From the wall. I packed the family medicine in boxes,
Puzzled that something had eaten our feathers.
4
No dress. No mirrors.
No mountain. No rings.
No braid. No tree.
Just chickens. Garden.
Bees. Rolling plains.
Tiny house. Pond singing spring.
Sleepless reach. Wordless gaze.
2017
Motion-Activated
A motion-activated light switch
Ignores the shadow bulk of my body,
Waits instead for my passing hand,
My passing hand, my passing hand.
Damn it! My office doesn’t want
To wake up either.
2017
Walking to the Mailbox After Rain
No one was driving in from the north
Or the south but the wind
As I walked the muddy drive,
Its dry skin almost stopping my sinking
On the way to get the mail.
Crossing the yellow highway line,
I noticed the bi-level cut of grass
Around the mailbox post—
Our neighbor’s gesture of kindness.
Anonymous financial mail
I would soon tear in half and discard
Tucked under my arm, I heard
The distant hum of a coming truck.
Time to re-cross. In the wide yard,
Young grasses waved in patches,
Thicker in the shadows of dying elms.
The odd ocotillo in the huge pot
Living lonely in the center of the yard
For who knows how long, stood
Taller than a man, with more arms.
And there, the cat litter bucket
I had just emptied in the dumpster,
Forgotten, rolled across the drive,
Tripped on the track of an early rivulet.
The propane tank, half full, crouched stout
As a legless, faceless, weathered hog.
Even though we may move soon,
You said we will fill it since it was full
When we first moved in, new with love.
2017
Moving to Salida
In the twenty-three years that it took
To return to the valley to live for good,
I pushed three children into likelihood,
Or they pushed me into spiral books,
And twenty-three rings grew in cottonwoods
Storing the river where they stood.
2017
Intellectual Property
Jean Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Cadmium), 1984, MCA, Denver
SAMO’s copyright
did not protect Basquiat.
ART bought what he stole.
His streetborn soul.
2017
Fine Audience
The shabby roof of the earth
Is just southwest of my house.
You think I’m being metaphorical.
(Show photo of severed shed roof
in the tall grass prairie, something
we never got around to burning.)
Thomas said you know a place
For the first time by returning.
I say, just before leaving.
We are both right.
A martini in a mason jar
With anchovy stuffed olives
Helps render the insight.
I’ll always wish meditation
Were so quick to tender
This lingering off-pillow presence.
Habit is hard to make.
In the red guest house
Where artists and poets have slept,
I have laid out their books
And hung lithic broadsides.
Covers curl
For moist air, for fingers,
For fly leaves and title pages.
I read aloud Jack’s poem on the wall
To no one but myself.
Twice taught.
I am a fine audience.
2017