poems by rachel kellum
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Two Meetings
1
millions of tiny
blue symbols
hung in the heart
a pregnancy of sky
fly out of me
touch everything
fill space
endless charm
of hummingbirds
not-hummingbirds
crowding the void
changing the world
the world endless
flowers not-flowers
into a humming
invisible blur
wings not-wings
fly back into me
not-me so my mind
may meet itself
blue and rest
2
Blue symbol
cubit balloon
not-balloon
hung before the heart
hovers gently
bumps along
destroys the world
touch by touch
mountain by mountain
sea by sea
bounce by bounce
cloud by cloud
moon by moon
sun by sun
love by love
pops every thing
and me meeting myself
popped empty
2019
with thanks to Khenpo Rinpoche
Bad Dog Haiku
I sweep tufts of hair
From my bedroom bamboo floor
Where dogs aren’t allowed.
Two couch cushions chewed.
What means more? Dog or couch?
Turn cushions. Hide holes.
2019
Homemade Apocalypses
#1
Driven by indefinite predators, you run
through the multistoried city puzzled together
like a colossal le Corbusier parking garage, leap
knotted streets threaded through with gurgling
orchestrated streams. Traffic fog stands
in pillars of light and shadow like fluctuating
headlights cutting through an ancient forest,
casting dirty Jacob’s Ladders, beaming
from low hanging firmaments of grey concrete.
Unable to escape, peer off the edge
of architectural monstrosity, this last Wonder,
witness a vista of Trump Tower-sized cubes
of refuse baled together with twists of iron twine,
receding into the stinking distance, the horizon
a rusted Donald Judd sculpture of postindustry.
#2
Walking a hotel hallway without hurry,
your small herd of humans knows the earth change
not the way wild animals do, limbic, in bones
before brains, but—with nowhere to run
on earth from earth’s gorgeous shockwave—
by the way a giant new update of gravity
gently sucks you into slumped piles of yourselves,
the unknown babe in your arms at once slack faced,
like you, full of useless bones and bright-eyed
with collapse, the surprise of benign paralysis,
the premonition of a future anthropologist,
evolved android drawing you piece by piece,
scattered as you will be throughout the others,
taking notes on your precise whereabouts
when it all went down, a diagram of destruction.
Strings
Tethered to the puppet
strings of two dogs
arms and legs tugged
by scents I cannot sense
I surrender to nose joys
made not for me
but for these dogs now bowls
for love my grown boys cannot hold.
I let my masters linger hungrily
sniffing shadows
while I pause over here
on the dark road looking up
waiting to move on.
2019
small enough
august and july
mosquitos held me
hostage from the milky way
hatted netted hurried
absent starlight
impossible to feel small
enough to write
2019