poems by rachel kellum
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Beckett’s Teacher Confesses
I realized today
while reading Act I,
I am not Vladimir
or Estragon. Aimless vagabonds.
I am Lucky.
Not lucky, Lucky.
The one who carries the bags
of the rich, and the hard stool, who teaches children,
not on purpose, to carry bags, too,
who puts down the load to dance,
or think, when Pozzo cracks the whip,
who used to dance and think for joy
before the QuaQuaQua
for the A-cacaca-demy,
who now collapses, exhausted
who stands and carries on automatically
when someone puts the handle
of the bag in my hand,
says, Nothing to be done.
Modern Silence
John Cage called
silence traffic
more or less true
of towns and minds
not two a.m. a mile
outside of Crestone
Furniture of the Dead
This morning after waking, I bathed my sour hair
and dressed in cotton woven by machines. Drifted
to the living room with couches snagged and draped
with children’s old bedsheets and books: protection
for cushions from cat claws while we sleep.
I could be a ghost waking up months dead, wandering
the family mansion full of dusty furniture, suspended—
freeze-tagged kids in Granny’s thin whites on Halloween,
no holes for eyes. But today I am alive. Not dead.
I undress the couch, the chair, to live in my house,
drink tea, watch light crawl across cobwebbed walls
and leaning plants, browning bananas in a bowl.
Today I sigh to sit by this tar-stained, stained-glass lamp,
the one by which I used to read in Laurie’s basement
to be near her—cooly smoking. The lamp holds on like grief
to potential light, the way I do, anticipating night, when
I can pull this chain and that, ignite its double bulbs,
glowing like my friend’s clear eyes through twisting smoke.
My Sister’s Arm
As little girls
and teens, it was
our favorite sister trick
to trade skin,
so simple to sit
on the sofa,
open my right hand
palm-up on her lap,
her left hand open
palm-up on mine,
arms crossed
in the X of a kiss,
of a chromosome,
the tip of my left finger
perched on her wrist,
her right fingertip
perched on mine.
Eyes closed,
synchronized so as not
to break the spell,
we would slide
our touch slowly, slowly
toward the tender
inner elbow of the other
and back to the wrist
when it would happen:
the eerie sensation
my sister’s arm was mine,
her finger now my finger
stroking my own arm
back and forth,
until we could no longer
bear the awful squirm,
the skin-crawling
truth, that future lie:
we are one—
my arm buried with her
in the mud
when she died,
her arm here
begging for touch
as I type.
I Know How Old Women Love
Gramps’ teeth in a cup
on the sink of my youth: perfect toothed smile
now in my own love’s mouth
Elegy for LVJ
When Ultra-Violet died,
her house plants,
silent green friends
for decades—
fern, heartleaf,
giant jade—died too.
Her kitchen radio
played classic rock
in the dark
for weeks, looking
antique but new,
seeking her ear.
Old cigarette ash lay
in a faceted glass tray
like faded buffalo,
like fingers mourning
the letters of her
nearby keyboard.
in memory of Laurie Violet James
The Work of Small Birds
Juncos and Nuthatches wait for Magpies to stop
pecking the suet basket, clean up crumbs
they drop. Chickadees wait too. On winter break,
I wait for my husband to return from work
after doing my own work grading journals.
Work: that giant, voracious, black and white bird,
shoulders blue-sheened with empty praise
of nobility to replace adequate compensation,
that racket scaring off the timid beaks in our chests
longing for anything new to do in this small town
beyond observing birds, walking the dog, witnessing
a shawl of cloud slip over silent mountains, binging
the lives of fictional characters from a coach seat,
that sedentary train of working-class, world travel,
our basket robbed of opportunity, something
greasy, something seedy to feed our small hours.