poems by rachel kellum
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Grocery Store Orchid
I’d never buy one.
It was a gift from a woman
who believes in me.
Quite soon
the stalk yellowed,
flowers drooped and fell.
The orchid, my orchid,
spends most of its life
as leaves, teaches
under water me
by spilling over, dying off,
teaches wait for me
and time, as always,
is beauty’s only currency.
The Old Phones
The old phones were family pets,
shared, oily, of heft, a comfort,
yet also retractable weapons
you could chuck at your sister,
black her eye and reel in
like a slick catfish. Yes, they were
small, warm bodies or, at least, body parts,
you could innocently fondle, a young cat
cradled against your neck with spiral tail
you could wrap around yourself
a dozen times, a DNA boa, a fetus
whose umbilical cord could stretch
across the kitchen, down the stairs,
through the hall, pulse invisibly under
your door where you could wait forever
on the floor for that boy to say something
into the dark shell of your ear floating
inside the flowered womb of your plush
carpeted bedroom. You could listen
to his busy signal, the silence inside
his steady breathing, all heart
beats. You could hear the voice
of your mother in the distance,
humming receive, receive, receive.
handbuilding us
love scores me / slips me
sticks me / smooths me
to you before we / grow leather hard
carves its / name into this
body we’ve become / fragile greenware
handed into fire / one earthen vessel
we hope for no fissures / we hope to hold
whatever we must / water wine blood
even cracked / a bowl can hold
almonds pencils / seedling coins dust
your heart an opus
three dimensional muscle
sculpture in your chest, yes, baby,
she said, we forget
with thanks to Wendy Videlock
Sutra for Letting Go of Aversion
You carry it in your pocket,
the great joiner and divider.
You carry it; it is not a shackle.
Shiny, flat world you unlock
with holy number to access
poems, gallery, mailbox,
camera, classroom, memory,
algorithmic Ouroboros news
feeding you you, yes, you:
your sudden mysteries and blue
morning dread, headlined
heart palpitations custom
collected For You by algorithm
that can’t comprehend truth,
only what the data knows you
demand: to feel furious, righteous,
ignited by the state, the smokey world.
You want more and more to be
satirically amused, rope-a-doped
with hope. You want to flick through
the bottomless scroll, dive,
kick deep for the story, that final
story that will stitch, wrap, drain
every awful wound. Helpless, lonelier
than primordial God, you uninstall
His newest news app. Undressed,
without hope or fear, observe
the busy emptiness. Bathe
in it, remember how you rode it,
your aversion nothing but a board
numbers buff to keep you surfing.
A Boring Movie
Halfway through the night, he’s up for hours for months.
To sleep again, he’ll read, drink tea, perch on the heater.
Earlier, after dinner, we always sit close to watch a show.
Tonight I ask him for a word. Airplane, he mumbles.
This is my new favorite way to surf Netflix, I say.
I search “airplane” and find what you might expect.
Leslie Nielsen. Every kind of flight disaster film. Cartoons.
War planes. History documentaries. Survival stories.
Highjacking heroes. And this run-on-titled gem:
Relaxing White Noise: Airplane Sleep Sounds White Noise -
Jetliner Plane Flight for Sleeping, Relaxation, made,
obviously, for people who trust pilots, mechanics, engineers—
long-legged men who say yes to the emergency exit seat,
not their short-legged wives who read and re-read
the laminated wordless cartoon instruction sheet.
The soundtrack is romantically ideal: pure, airy engine sound
unpunctuated by coughs, crying babes or conversations
between loud flirtatious strangers sharing a row. Visually,
the film loops a CGI of a Relaxing Airways jumbo jet
oaring through a sky of endless wispy popcorn clouds.
Fluidly panning, we see the plane from above, the side,
float over the wing, linger on the tail logo, back off,
sink below the wing at a distance, look up at an angle,
follow from behind, pass a yellow sun, catch a glinting sea,
rise to birds’ eye once more, shift slowly down to the nose,
pan windows along the length to the tail, land again
on the logo of a sleeping woman’s head on a pillow.
And so on and so forth for an hour and fifty-nine minutes.
Fifty in, he wakes. What are we watching, he asks.
White noise, I say. Uh, he says, and sleeps. I type.
The plane flies in one direction. I am moving around it.
Or, I am still and the plane is turning slowly, showing off.
I look up from time to time, learn by heart the order of the loop.
He sleeps. Really this is not a bird’s but a god’s eye view.
When I am in the sky, I never imagine the possibility
someone, somewhere, could be watching the machine
from above, the vessel in which I am so small, a face
in a window, confined to unfeathered body and two eyes,
photographing clouds below. The wing is slightly in the way.
I crop the shots to hide my helpless state. Memorizing
light on cirrus, finally relaxing my grip on him, I do not sleep.
Sumo Wrestling in the Time of Trump
Come here, darling,
bring your giant underbelly,
four hundred years of pain
stuffed inside. Here is mine,
too, jiggling with the dark weight—
millennia of white woman servitude,
we two burdens no longer enslaved
in black body or angelic mind.
Trembling with engorged pride
grown over centuries to protect
our fragile kindness, our kind,
confused in our new little powers,
we advance on each other,
misdirected rage coalescing
in a farcical, rippling spectacle
of flying sweat, hugging grips,
crumpled faces, cartwheel flips,
shifting feet, crushed belly flesh,
until the ring becomes a bed
and exhausted we collapse
each into the smallest dolls
of our nested selves. Wooden
histories shed, we search: bones
stretched over by thinning skin,
eyes—liquid gifts asking somehow
to enter the other, be forgiven.
For further reference, read Rudyard Kipling’s“The White Man’s Burden” (1899) and CoventryPatmore’s “The Angel in the House” (1854).2020
Reluctant Inhabitant
A Danish woman with blond dreadlocks drives up
in a newish Subaru, its bumper dent a concave bowl, to buy
her barefoot boy—also blond, curly echo of my grown sons—
a breakfast burrito. Hermit I've become, I see her each time
I drive through town to pick up mail or milk: there she is
perched on low walls across the street from the pub,
or on a coffee house bench, bright summer dress flowing,
sipping matcha, calling to her children in a sister tongue.
Early motherhood granted me a similar, darker beauty,
that lonely freedom. I hungered for any confirming glance
for proof I was more than untouchable mother-flesh,
reluctant inhabitant of that mortifying ambivalence.
Big Boy
A small boy crawls expertly out of the back window
of an expensive SUV with its share of dents,
a twenty flapping in his outstretched hand, shoeless,
padding into the heart of a town that loves him.
A man at the gas pump calls hello, his name,
and the boy waves the bill at him joyfully,
disappears into the belly of the organic grocery.
He emerges with three large bottles: two orange juices
and kombucha, manages to waddle back to the car,
successfully pass them up through the driver’s side
to his beautiful mother, who takes a big swig
before passing one bottle back to his sister
in her car seat and the other to him, her big boy,
already past the sill, safely strapped in, reaching.