poems by rachel kellum
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A Drift of Pigs
In the clearing past the woods
behind our neighborhood, we found
a shot-up car, glass dangling from the
gaping windshield like broken teeth,
a half burnt farm house with canned goods
and fruit preserves still on basement shelves
and outdated, thin cotton dresses in the closet
Better yet, an abandoned barn—full of straw
and a lazy rope— surrounded by a fenced yard
of wild grass and weeds needled through
two jerkified pigs, whiskered leather and teeth
eyes shrunken black
Squeals and groans
slow motion survey of the strange scene
tiptoeing through awful weeds
Who left you in the yard?
Was the farmer’s wife crying?
What is it like to die naked beneath the sky?
Was it night?
Were you hungry?
Yellow spread light across me,
my best friends and the pigs like butter
We moved from mundane mystery
to the stubborn barn door,
ran through the maze of stalls rich
with sweet old stink
Forgetting unlucky pigs, numb
or, perhaps, reveling in our living limbs
despite the pigs, we took turns
with the thick rotting rope, leaped
from the loft and swung
from rafters like promise
after promise after promise, flying,
falling into straw, newborn pigs
stunned by air and gravity
looking up into dust riding light
Three Late Winter Haiku
The stunted pine shakes.
Perched inside, a mound of snow—
sphinx heart carved by wind
* * *
A fat log burns bright.
Five friends roll six dice and laugh.
Everybody wins.
* * *
Graupel filled footprints
crunching back and forth for miles.
At least half are mine.
On Reading Woolf Again After 26 Years
–for Chrissy Mason, with fondness
Over Thai, bright eyed, Chrissy confessed
she once wrote out every sentence
Virginia Woolf ever penned.
Novels. Short stories, essays too.
The way the nuns would read
fine literature aloud and pause
as pupils scratched down word
for word in perfect penmanship.
The nuns were, I was, laying down the track,
she said, for what a sentence could do.
And now, as I re-read Orlando’s thoughts,
Clarissa’s— gasp at her shilling tossed
into the Serpentine, her never-Septimus
(Clarissa’s double; Woolf’s triple, and mine)—
and think them, I am also thinking Chrissy’s,
perhaps, marveling at Virginia’s odd clauses,
generous commas, semicolon hitches; hooking
coach cars; occupied by well-heeled, awkward
friends; freight cars bursting delphinium;
shadow cargo; centuries of ice coupled
with foiled men waking up as women;
everything pulling on everything else
behind the locomotive of her mind;
riding a rail that will never arrive,
or always; in Vita’s arms; in one of several
lakes; in my hands; yours. Call it luck
to rattle under the warping weight of her,
all of us, every place: her station.
Ballistics
Twenty years forward
six feet behind
the antique rocker (point one)
in which I nursed
my firstborn son—
a bullet hole in the floor
instead of his head
(the second and third points
of a scalene triangle),
blessed.
My Argument with Sartre's Math
One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life. — Jean-Paul Sartre
We outgrow the earth
from which we grew
our early fame and infamy,
seeds flung by storms
into new, forgotten grounds.
Or, we compost our youth.
George Sand’s sturdy suits,
love affairs, tobacco smoke—
soil—for menopausal altruism.
Malcolm X’s white devils
for brotherly love’s final gun.
Mark Twain’s naive Finn and Jim
for the dark Mysterious Stranger.
Ram Dass’ Harvard spin with LSD
for Now’s inner God of Stroke.
My father’s four kids—cut losses—
for a Spirit World pardon of a line
of broken boys-turned-our-fathers.
My early LDS One True Church
for many truths, for Natural Mind.
For what blooms will you be known
after your long, weedy life?
Change the metaphor, Writer, Fisher,
hope your readers understand
your denouement and fall with you,
uncaught by the unknotted net.
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