poems by rachel kellum
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A Party of Pinyon Jays
I wake to dozens of dusty blue pinyon jays laughing nasally
at the feeder hanging on the piñon outside our bedroom window.
They decimate the suet brick in minutes—neither they nor I know
they are going extinct—peck with great lust, share the small feast.
Two orange headed, yellow breasted, black winged western tanagers
hang back, do without—neither they nor I know they are abundant—
lick remaining grease from the empty basket when the jays go.
I notice I prefer their sunny timidity to the greedy racket of blue.
On a nearby limb, a magpie watches me mount the stool. Takes off
to tell its mate. I refill the basket. Wait. Each bird plans a coup.
Muted tanager approaches the feed. Giant magpie drops. She flees.
I clap. All clear till her return. She nibbles. Flits off. Nuthatch takes a turn.
Late morning, a single jay discovers the suet full again. Scout perched
on a tall piñon, he chortles and cries across miles of chaparral.
Come! Come! Come! Come! Come! Come! Come! Come! They do.
A recent report on the threatened status of pinyon jays:
“Defenders of Wildlife Seeks Endangered Status for Pinyon Jay,” Albuquerque, NM, April 26, 2022
The Last Cut in Our Limited Series
A shared glance of joie de vivre
then turning back to what we do:
the book, the broom, the pen, the seed,
the plate, the drill, the trail, the moon,
the sprout, the dog, the tune, the leaf,
the pill, the wash, the snow, the croon,
the call, the pan, the sigh, the cream,
the tea, the cloud, the deer, the room,
the egg, the wine, the bill, the screen,
the sink, the child, the road, the bloom,
the grill, the pine, the hen, the weed,
the wood, the soil, the hand, the shoe,
the fire, the nap, the cat, the creek,
the bowl, the knife, the rib, the coop,
the prayer, the salt, the dome, the peak,
the leg, the rhyme, the fish, the tooth,
the smoke, the time, the rain, the sleep,
adieu, adieu, adieu, adieu.
Past Fifty
Who knew I would feel
young? Except in
my bones, poor posture,
parched mornings
after nights of bottles
with mountain poets,
patio music, chosen brothers,
liberated sister-mothers
toasting the post pandemic
opening of this
end of the road town.
How can I say it?
I used to run and run.
I know that high.
My body did my bidding.
And so much wanting.
Such a drug. It wanes.
The constant longing
for more than life
can offer a young mother
already rich with children.
Joy and regret.
Strange bedfellows.
All of that in me today
in the quiet, and my love
dozing here on the sofa,
his long legs draped across
my lap, hands folded
on his belly, head tilted up
on a pillow, beautiful
in that awful pose.
We both and all of us
are for the pyre.
It’s not a metaphor.
We’ve watched it burn.
Absorbed its warmth.
But now! We are alive,
my love and I, these bones,
turning to look at each other
from time to time,
my writing arm in the sun.
The Wayback Machine
Sally Jane Seck is not only my web guru but also a time wizard. She found The Wayback Machine, an internet archive with snapshots of all kinds of old wordweeds content. This discovery is strangely comforting, like the time I found out my old dog Mojo hadn’t yet been cremated weeks after her death and was still curled up as if in an afternoon snooze in the vet office deep freeze. I got to say a second goodbye. B minus Buddhist that I am, I have a hard time letting things go sometimes. Now I can say a proper farewell. Here’s the old wordweeds homepage featuring a 10/10/2020 post. Rest in peace, WW.
Fish Heads
after Raymond Carver
Ted Fish made heads out of clay.
He was known for it, loved.
These heads are all over Salida.
Pinch lipped busts in shop windows.
Bobbing ornaments in dead trees.
One, a skinless, meat-red monolith
sits on a bank among boulders,
casting the line of its low gaze
over the Arkansas, a marker
for boaters to measure depth.
I never knew him except through
others’ grief. He died a few
weeks before I moved there.
On the table. Under the knife.
His heart.
Two heads came into my hands
in round about ways. One
from a new friend, fellow artist
and co-worker, Ben, whose
eyes teared up when he handed
it to me, a porcelain, grimacing,
two-faced thing with a hole
clear through the crown to
the throat, passage for some jute
rope I’ve planned for years to string
with fat, glass beads the color
of Caribbean swells. Maybe
I’ll finally get to it. After a story,
Barbara, poet who refuses
public farewells and left his funeral
early, gave me the other: a black face—
blue edged, sort of grinning—emerging
from white porcelain slab. The whole
thing attached to a small black canvas
with two long copper wire stitches.
I placed it on the piano where sheet
music should perch. The piano
is always out of tune, but my son
plays it anyway. Two nights ago,
on a stop as he was driving through,
the tiny head rang, watery
with my son’s invented song.
When I hugged him hello
and later goodbye, hard, I felt him
tremble, quaking in the core, a dark
face pressing through his body
into mine. In the kitchen, he talked
in low, steady tones, like there
was earth under his feet, said
when he gets back he’s drying out,
going to stop filling the hole
with every dead sailor in the sea.
“You can do it,” I said, “change karma,
consequence.” Which was too much,
another hole. You can do it is all I meant,
but saying less is hard for me. He knows.
“Thank you,” he said, and for a second,
soft eyed, lost himself among crumbs
on the counter. Then raised his head.
Buddha Woman Speaks and Surrenders, Again
Oh, it is you again
standing here within me,
dancing the darkest moon of my dish
washing, gnawing my hipped belly bowl
promising blood.
You tango through the terror
of my uninhabited dreams, rip
the seams of me where these
clothes don’t fit, haven’t fit
for years of moons at many sinks.
I try not to think about it, but you,
Blood Woman, you needle
to keep me true to who
I think I am, or wanted to be,
but I am always changing, see?
We never agree. You say throw the plates!
I say make them gleam.
I am tired of our existential arguing.
Of cutting myself in pieces for your uses:
Mother, writer, sister, teacher, lover, painter, blue.
You are ruthless, refuse to let me lose these faces.
If only we could multiply our tongue by two!
If only they could flap at once,
in absolute and relative bliss,
Laughing: this/not this! this/not this!
But you won’t have it.
You insist: this, this, this!
I can’t resist. I drop a dish.
2008
featured in Slow Trains, 2008
vestige of an old friend
It’s been two intensive weeks of moving twelve years worth (820-some posts!) of wordweeds content from Wordpress to this new, more functional and, hopefully, more beautiful Squarespace site. With the expert help of my web guru, the incomparable poet Sally Seck, it was a fairly simple, joyful process to witness the ease with which all content (posts, comments, photos, pages, categories, dates, archives, etc.), slid right into their new home without a hitch but one: every single poem had decided to throw off the clothing of line breaks and stanzas and start their new lives as chunky, naked little prose poems. Hence began the face-melting, time consuming task of cutting and pasting, cutting and pasting previously formatted poems into the new site. It was a labor of love, as they say, a gentle reckoning to handle the cloth of poems written as far back as the late 1990s, travel through the sunshine and storms of the twenty-oughts and -tens up to now. I’m grateful for the opportunity to go back and re-read what has become a rather large body of work, my body. I’m mixing metaphors now.
A pang of grief shocked through me when I successfully transferred the wordweeds.com domain name to the new site, clicked refresh, and realized my old site was gone forever. Poof. She was a dear friend and curator of my poetry life for over a decade. I miss her already, the funny way she dressed.
I wish I had snapped a screenshot of that adorably circa 2010 homepage design, with its long scarf of a navigation bar hanging along the right arm of the page, forcing me to make short line breaks. It’ll be nice to have more room to stretch out here.
This image of the homepage header will have to do: a business card that has always better served as a book mark.
For now these hot days is the mad blood stirring…
My Mad Blood
I’m thrilled to have ten poems featured in Mad Blood #7!
Much thanks to the gifted poet and publisher Padma Thornlyre for putting this gorgeous collection together in a trying time.
Affording Sugar
On mother’s day I’m up early,
peeking in on my child,
wiping up cat vomit, sharing
yesterday’s beet scraps
with five chickens in the run,
feeding two dogs who never tire
of my touch. My husband
and youngest son, who arrived
last night while I slept,
are still asleep, bless them,
giant men whose lives happen
above my head, witnessing
the dusty tops of fridges
everywhere they go. They know.
I’m down here, whisking matcha,
marveling at cedar shadows
quaking across dusty windows,
a sun rising through smoke
over the Sangres, boiling
four parts water to one part
sugar for the hummingbird
we heard zipping about this week,
looking for our sweet life, the one
my grandmother gave me
growing my sweet mother inside,
whose tiny body already cradled
all the eggs she’d ever release,
including me, so lucky.