poems by rachel kellum
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Couplets of Snow, Alone
The sky starts as flakes, lands wet.
A juniper drops glassy beads, one by one.
The Frigidaire’s high whine goes dead.
Silence brings the flat white sky inside.
A cat crunches kibble in my closet head.
A black dog stares out my window eye.
Snow buries words within my chest.
I don’t look for a shovel or sun.
2019
Your River
Smart speakers offer manual options for volume
for people like you whose giggle, talking ridiculously
to plastic, quickly turns to awe and bossiness.
Hey, Google, play “River” by Leon Bridges.
Hey, Google, 75% volume. Hands free, music makes
a soundtrack for cooking, cutting onions.
Hey, Google, 100% volume. Constant visual overlay
these days. Memory’s relentless mind screens couple
with memories of small screens, fingers scroll songs,
click video versions: a black father’s blood-spattered
white t-shirt, his baby crying, calmed on his chest, tiny
red-wet fingers, Black people in white, standing in water,
not the literal river you misremember: they sing in rain
enhanced by a hose, join the onion on the cutting board.
This isn’t video. Your husband is out buying avocados
and blue chips. The song story thunders through you just
below a rolling memory of the morning he held you up
on your feet, thighs and knees giving out with father grief,
beneath your cry, are you going to leave me, and the song
came on spontaneously, the river song, the song
now always a stream in the dark of your son’s room,
smelling of unwashed clothes and an old dog,
the room, looking into the kitchen, where he, your love,
sat with you on a messy floor-mattress, untangled
antique knots of abandonment, your face a river.
You say you are always waiting for what you deserve,
that being left is what you will get for what you gave
and have been given, your narrative inheritance.
He asks, can’t we rewrite that end? I want to, you say.
Songs shuffle. Onions gleam. The kitchen glows yellow
with the promise of a new mythology, a river flowing
without water, without gravity, without a final sea.
Here’s Leon Bridges’ song, River
Cohen's New Antidepressant
Following a joyful litany of faces, pastries
Fruits and bosoms, Leonard Cohen ends with
I am so grateful to my new antidepressant
And I think not much of it, no judgment
But no gratitude, either, in my ignorance,
For pharmaceutical panaceas. It is not yet time
To release that sputtering trope: Rise
Above neurosis with your mind. And we hope
It won’t kill us, the darkness in which we shine,
Groping for yet sometimes blind to intermittent sun.
2019
Leonard Cohen, flame dear,
Give me your danger
Your simple eye and word
So I may have the courage
To write the beautiful bore
The helpless mother-terror
Each day of my slow burn.
2019
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.