poems by rachel kellum
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Dear Me
This can’t be said with elegance: you were wrong about this place. No, that’s not right. I was wrong. I’ve lost track of our front range, where either of us end, but we’ve been on the plains for most of eighteen years, arguing like sisters sharing only two legs. You the dusty light inside, bent on wiping boredom out. Listen here. Ignore yourself. Isn’t this your life? Eat, eat! Even if you don’t, I’ll say you did. I taught you love of chickens, feathered ones. To sprinkle salt on the living dish. Despite yourself, despite the wealth of butter out of reach, you have eaten Brush’s roadside honey, shucked her yellow corn, planted Art’s red spuds. Better, you gave bees a home in garden sage, grew ears and eyes in your own plot and they were good. Take the prairie with you. She is not the pale flat-chested sister no one notices. You’ve looked into her eyes. Take her plain face into the bosom mountains. Draw her furrows with your toes. Drop new seed. This wide valley nothing but the mountains’ prairie dream. Your flat green heart.
Burning Books with Jack on Trickster Ridge
When he threw Amor Fati
into flames, friends and poets gasped.
White book! Heads shook.
I ran to find mine bubble wrapped
in briefcase, amateur sky
with all the colors in it.
ah jumped in after Jack like a sigh,
after Danny’s hurled script, wanting nothing
more than for words to say nothing,
burn, be nothing with his.
Daiva turned his glowing pages with a stick.
We acolytes of Jack-spent light!
Unreadable ash
made of us and especially
Jack gibbering joy-scat
to the earless moon, hands
grasping at the halo like a drowning man,
fingers coming up empty and fool.
This is a revision of the poem I posted on Feb. 20, 2017, in loving memory of Jack Mueller who died yesterday on April 27, 2017. He lives on and on in the Word.
The Dangerous Life of Free Range Chickens
Of sixteen since last spring:
Four chickens remain.
Six killed for fun by two Great Pyrenees,
A mother and pup
Who ran across the prairie in April rain,
Left birds limp necked,
Scattered in dripping weeds.
Then gone the oldest in the flock:
DJ Cluck dragged off northwest.
Next, the Leghorn, white,
Easy target from above.
Not a feather left. I theorize
About light colored hens,
Imagine startling talons, sudden height.
But then went Speck.
Her camouflage no help.
Still, I should have known.
Predators have a taste for the sweet.
Next, in one morning, we are missing three.
Goodbye, Elsa. Goodbye, Fawkes and friend.
There will be no more green eggs
Once the cartons are empty.
I blame the watching hawk,
Dorell suspects the local owls,
Their early morning duet.
He suggests we take a walk
To the base of their favorite tree
To look for bones. Suddenly I think
Of owl pellets I used to collect,
Full of mouse skulls, still whole.
2017
Clerihew for You Know Who
Counting sound in limerick
Bursting with the ego’s trick:
Scholar poet doggerel
Makes the female bosom swell.
2017
How to Grow Carrots, Onions and Garlic Without Lifting a Finger
Promise yourself to dig up the rest come fall.
Procrastinate before first frost.
Blame your job.
Forget until snow falls.
Ignore regret’s negative self-talk.
Touch their mushy shoulders come spring.
Witness what you thought was dead sprout green.
2017
Four years I have lived
My words are hiding in his body.
Perhaps I am the culprit.
Self-saboteur who hid them there.
Home alone no poems come.
I wait in long space. He walks in at dusk
in canvas clothes, the poem I didn’t write,
with huge thighs, silk arms,
towering white smile like moonshine,
torso warm locomotive stillness.
I hold my breath a moment like kids
passing through a mountain tunnel.
He moves through me. I can’t say why
I was made for this, why I mourn
no muse. Four years I have lived
with a man who doesn’t know
he is my favorite poem.
2017
Omission Sonnet
After the lovemaking, after his voice softens
in apology, it is likely best to steer clear
of parsing small omissions that often
mean no more than there are bigger things here
than fretting over who has kept a pocket-
sized fib to oneself. No need to get hysterical,
but one small stab of why soon needs a tourniquet.
Bleeding through the kitchen, playing oracle,
I ask myself, what does omission mean? What
did I do to make him feel he’d need a priest
to seek forgiveness? My worst fear: he’s cut
me from his wary ex’s cloth, the woman I am least
like in my book. I black her off of pages on his shelf,
afraid, by reading her, I wrote her on myself.
2015, 2017
A Question for Merrill Kellum
The morning after you sold the farm,
Did you wake early to milk the cows,
And, remembering, simply stand in the dew
In your button up gold sweater
And brown fedora tipped just so
To watch the yellow creep up the oak
In your new neighborhood?
I can hardly believe the only time
I remember of you is the many years
Of your retirement in Meredosia,
Hands on your hips to study sky
And cocklebur fields where we kids
Would play king of the mountain
On construction dirt piles, pushing.
You would puff your cherry tobacco pipe
On the small concrete patio
Behind your house, announce if the world
Smelled like rain on the way, as if that
Knowledge were all that remained
Of your dairy days. It was enough to plant
A slow seed in me, plucking burs from my socks.
2017