poems by rachel kellum
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Happy National, um, Global Poetry Month!
It is once again time for the NaPoWriMo poetry challenge of writing a poem a day for the entire month of April... only now they are also calling it GloPoWriMo, for Global Poetry Month! I like it. Give me some good ol' globalism.
Confession: on April 2, I realized I had forgotten about the challenge! This is a bad sign of busyness. So, I've cheated by writing April 1st's poem on April 2 and posting it as though I wrote it yesterday.
All's fair in love and poetry.If you need writing prompts, visit the Na/GloPoWriMo website:
Selective Memory
In every era of my life
I focus on what’s hard, groom with sighs.
Embracing moments, sure—
A student’s shine, three small detours,
Two diving laughs, a friend’s door,
Her fire road, his midnight pledge—
All while standing on a great ledge,
The dark vertigo of what more.
My boney, endless needs.
Here and there agree to disagree.
From plains to hills
To plains from hills
And back to hills again.
Looking back from every here
Old ledges disappear
Or hone the beauty pain.
It seems my life is lovely, high or low,
And I’ll look back to now—
As black waves build to steal
My sweetest love into the deep,
And I am wind- and salt-stung, wading, braced—
And recall only the shore of him: solid, free,
Suction-soothed, grains shifting softly under me,
The moon waning in the morning grace.
Milky Way
Silvia Barajas-Ceja once said,
“No bad thoughts while you bake
Or you’ll ruin the cake,” but I mixed
An inexplicable sadness in with the eggs,
And the cake baked just fine,
Except for when it sank a bit when I opened
The door too early. Undaunted, sadness
Rose again like a chest after inhalation,
And goldened and fell again, cooling
On the stovetop. It didn’t matter.
You flip a three milk cake upside down
Anyway, and it should look flat,
Not domed. When my knife shagged
The wall of the cake and left a gouge
Right before I dropped it on the plate,
I didn’t care. Whipped cream hides
The dents, swaddles my sorrow
Like baby Jesus to feed my friends.
When they said it was the best cake
They’d ever had, my sorrow
Sparkled in their eyes, a milky way.
Event Horizon
“You are approaching the crone,”
small babes in the room announce,
bouncing on young mothers’ knees.
Or rather, my uterus makes
a cosmic joke, opens like a black hole,
an event horizon of information
setting up my babes to have babies.
I’ve thrown out my seeds to be swallowed,
Lent rough arms, blue eyes,
Wide face, strong back, tough feet.
My fractals zoom in yet ever recede!
My holographic birds perch in distant trees!
“Fly home, fly home,” this old body drones,
But my feathers have long been released.
With thanks to “Sidebar: The Holographic Principle,” by JR Minkel, in Scientific American: “Quantum mechanics starts with the assumption that information is stored in every volume of space. But any patch of space can become a black hole, nature’s densest file cabinet, which stores information in bits of area. Perhaps, then, all that’s needed to describe a patch of space, black hole or no, is that area’s worth of information. The idea is called the holographic principle, after the way that a hologram encodes 3D information on a 2D surface…. ‘The world doesn’t appear to us like a hologram, but in terms of the information needed to describe it, it is one,’ Bousso says. ‘The amazing thing is that the holographic principle works for all areas in all space times.’”
Piñon Doesn’t
Piñon doesn’t ask me how I am.
“Not fine,” I don’t say. “Tears have run
my eyes all morning.”
“Why?” its needles don’t ask.
I don’t say, “Because the one
I gave my life doesn’t want my hands,
Would rather fall alone.”
Piñon drops a cone.
2018
Final Grief
The edgeless hole
you left in my childhood
chest awaits.
I beg life. I beg you.
Let me lower
your body into that grave.
Let me shovel dirt
over every lost and never-made
memory of you.
Let me tuck you into earth
with my story,
hide you like a bone.
I’ll lean on my shovel and sob.
Roll out a rectangle of sod.
Lie over you like a dog.
I’ll sit up. Stand like sky.
Walk back into my life,
your living tombstone.
This Kind of Night
Live among people who revel in quiet.
Let night be fully night.
Exit the dim house with Leo on leash.
House lights homely earth stars—
Sky has swallowed the neighbors.
Leo pulls me into darkness with his nose.
Roads wait black and silent minutes.
The giant empty sound gets inside.
Let’s sit on the winter porch and listen
Past midnight, see if quiet minutes
Churn to hours.
Leo gets nervous. A pack
Of valley coyotes howl. Their yipping
Such a tonal range of clownishness.
Think their laughter human.
Listen close for people chiming in,
As I would like to. Join the coyote din.
A second mountain pack
Starts up its echo ruckus in duet.
House dogs cough a husky bark or two
Of distant memory, genetic mourning
For a tongue now lost to them.
Leo squeals a whimpered beg to walk,
Not stop to listen to the night.
From middle of the road, we shuffle
To the shoulder, then a neighbor’s dark drive
When headlights beam their distant crawl
Toward us, throwing light through stands
Of piñon pine like flashlights cutting up
A wild colonnade. And our six legs. Like prey,
Long shadows scramble mad for cover.
Once the car has passed, its path a thinning hiss
Of asphalt kissing wheels, I hold my breath,
Look up at Taurus, almost disappear.
No wonder now—that cosmic gleam
In longtime locals’ eyes. This kind of night,
Given time, will have its way with everyone.
Make us not quite right for well-lit city life. There,
In debt, I shred my heart to pass through nets.
Swim in schools for coins and loans. Self-turncoat.
Jealous, uncomfortable, I’ve feigned fun shrugging off
The Crestone gaze, a bit too wild and bright
To live for bills alone. It dawns, this place
Will night my face, star my eyes. By then I doubt
I’ll even care if colleagues look surprised.
Walking the Green Belt
Piñon desert paths remember
All our feet until the wind.
Post office bound, his dog ahead sniffing the way,
I swear I see my son’s size ten Converse tread
Of yesterday, homeward bound from school,
Slightly off the choppy sea of dog paws
And mule deer hooves, the scattered
Patterns of factory made soles in sand.
Imagining his solitary walk, I grin: his cheeks
Rosy with winter, blue eyes scanning
For prickly pear, then, the sudden upward glance
At sky, his left foot stepping just there.
Zen and the Art of Moving Back into the Middle Class
The new house starts out pure space.
We imagine living in it this way, empty,
Like monks or motes, needing nothing
But to float on light, to wake from a dream.
The trucks roll in with couches and beds,
Boxes of clothes we forgot we owned,
Too many dressers, four decades of Nat Geo,
Easels, two hand-me-down wheels and a kiln.
We break our backs on the chance
There will be time to paint, throw clay, collage.
(Where to store old paintings without a garage?)
Pans! Spices! Bowls! Books! Zafus! We’re home!
Space fills and fills like a mind. We settle in.
The couch is comfortable. Most of the clothes fit.
Enlightenment comes: we are not monks, but parents.
A teacher. A carpenter. A commute. A mortgage.