poems by rachel kellum
to comment ✒️ click on a title
Crestone Poetry Festival
Crestone Poemfest 6.0, our first in-person fest since Covid hit, was an incredible comeback lovefest of intergenerational rural and urban poets from across Colorado, New Mexico and the Navajo Nation. We brought in water from all directions, in hexagonal formation.
It’s been only five days since everyone dispersed. I still haven’t caught up on my sleep, already jonesing for more creative exhaustion with the poetribe.
We cheered for child-poets, birthed an exquisite corpse, bonded over botanical elixirs and scrumptious curries. We composted jazz and poetry with SETH and the Word Mechanics at T-Road Brewery. We soul-collaged, paraded and bathed in eclipse light casting crescent shaped shadows through our fingers, hair and wicker chairs. We wrote rambling Renga and fairy tales of narrowly escaped disasters. We harvested permaculture-principled poetry from Atwoodian bread and played poetry games in the magic circles of Fluxus instructions.
We brought our favorite books to the deserted island, wandered queerly along a creek dressed in gold and sage-woven tumbleweeds and spiraled bark. We hand bound books, reimagined word-nature and danced in quantum-entangled playgrounds of mycopoetry. We ate balsamic beet poems for lunch, put people first, poetry second, and found poems everywhere anyway.
We grooved with, jarred against, jam band Black Market Translation’s joyful Punketry accompaniment, unstopped our ears with righteous fire of the Beyond Academia Free Skool of Poetry, roared with Talking Gourds elder Art Goodtimes whose bellowing mantra NO… MORE… KINGDOMS! LET… THERE… BE KINDOMS! still whisper-shouts in my mind stream while I teach valley kids how to hand-build clay pumpkins, alliterate, or stop-motion-animate charcoal drawings of women emerging from tree roots.
That final morning, we nibbled scones and jazzed grief. We crossed out our names and scribbled love notes in margins. We passed the gourd, we passed the gourd, we passed the gourd. It spiraled outward.
I’m not sure how poets save the world, but they save me—trying, re-wiring, de-commodifying—one poem at a time.
Long live the Crestone Poetry Festival.
Outside the Path of Totality
I never knew my hands were cameras,
Their tiny spaces human pinholes
Of Renaissance technology,
Projecting what is upside down
To trace the world’s lines.
Unable to look up,
I filter bitten sun through fingers.
How did we get here? This point
Where men no longer fear
Gods will steal the day forever for our hate,
Marching through streets with torches,
Effigies of burning crosses, effigies
Of black bodies flaming in leaves.
Even the leaves of lynch trees
Become apertures.
How dare you strive to turn the oak
Against the sun?
Countless crescent suns
Shimmer in astonishing shadows at our feet.
Black feet of the man I love—
Warped with work and callouses,
Black feet I have rubbed with oil,
Touched with lips, toenails like moons,
Their clippings, eclipsed suns—
Walk this earth.
That day in a pause at work,
He took a photo of tree shadows
To give me all the smiling suns,
Sent it through air to me
Taking the same picture to send to him
In the pause of my own day,
Nudging students to care, to see,
To say something.
How dare you strive to turn the trees
Against this love?
We cannot be obscured.
Our eyes are moons and suns at once.
Arms wrap around each other’s sore backs,
Black hands warm on white skin,
White hands warm on black,
Who is eclipsing whom? No one.
We are love, unstoppable phenomena.
One student called it awesome and awful.
We have no control of it. Heatless light.
Another called it midday dusk and dawn.
Take off your cardboard glasses.
Drop your eyes to earth.
Bless light filtering trees.
Look through your own hands
And weep.
After the Unite the Right white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, and the following total solar eclipse
Cul-de-sac
I would let agony
have its privacy
why tell you—every night
all night, the quiet man
of the cul-de-sac
who walks to town
with a backpack
to buy his milk
eggs or liquor
cries out sharply
in wordless baritone grit
often staccato—a war
it changes the stars
flavors the giant
insomniac silence
gets into my husband’s
cracks, plants dark seeds
in words, tone
in the belly of the next day
tonight I close
the window
trap stale air
small silence, sleepless
the cries carry on
inside me, I strain
to hear him, companion
beyond the glass
slide the door
to the porch
take a blanket
to the metal love seat
antique rocker
strange comfort, his groans
all of us involuntary
voyeurs of pain
on a 45 degree night
in the window of the neighbor
between us and him
an air conditioner
begins to whir
out of nowhere
white noise
the day after rain, a walk
music rises tinnily
from my back pocket
a conch blows
a bit up the mountainside
old Buddhist
I silence my phone
to another
and another sputtered blow
then crickets
scratch of my own feet
my dog leaps through cactus
pauses to chew grass
choke it up twice
the air wet-piñon sweet
after a day of partial sun
another dog up the way
barks the glow down
beneath a distant storm
The Great Perfection
walking the bardo
between perfect shots and screens
don’t plan your next post
The Sea Who Named Itself
You should use the pronoun “that” when you’re referring to an object
or a living creature without a name, which leaves the pronoun “who”
for when you’re referencing a person or living thing that is named.
~Candace Osmond, the Grammarist
Lushootseed comes from two words, one meaning "salt water"
and the other meaning "language," and refers to the common
language, made up of many local dialects, that was spoken
throughout the region. ~Coll-Peter Thrush, historian, University of Washington
Is spoken. Is.
The Salish name of Puget Sound
is Whulj: the sea we know,
our salt water. Home.
Wade in up to your chin.
Listen.
The shore, incessant, whispers it:
whulj, whulj, whulj, whulj
Even seals know it,
spoke Lushootseed
long before a white man sailed,
picking names like nits
from his powdered wig
to plot a sea
who never needed him.
Sugar to Water
He mixes
nectar
like a bartender
hoping for a big tip
1 to 1
a dozen birds
swarm four holes
vie and zip
tiny addicts
Red
Already overstocked with jam
from last July, we netted the cherry tree
to buy time, deepen its red before harvest,
black plastic threads a woven protection
from wild birds and fat ground squirrels.
Last night I found one of the latter tangled
and stiff in the net—likely killed
by the day’s heat or my curious dog
obsessed with chasing small things—
having failed to safely enter the hole I cut
last week to save a robin who hung
upside down all day, feathered Odin,
one leg extended and stiff, wild eyed,
red breast heaving with fight
and free wings. She clamped
her sharp beak on shaking fingers
and mosquito net sleeves as we toiled,
my thighs and back side already itching
with the onslaught of dusk’s usual pestilence,
for which I took no time to spray,
having just showered off the day’s oils,
on my way to address this tragedy.
You crouched there with me, aiming
the light, twitching, smacking ankles,
eventually admitting I can’t, I’m sorry, I can’t
and retreated indoors. Desperate, bunching up
a fist of brand-new net above the bird,
I hacked a hole decisively, exposed
a breach, next week’s gaping, deadly door,
and brought the feathered thing inside.
I cradled her in a red kitchen towel.
You tenderly snipped with shears
fine black threads from the stiff leg,
her claw pointed like God’s finger
away from us, hunched and wincing
against futility, hoping this Hail Mary
was not too late, that blood might circulate,
reanimate the leg. When I released her
at the edge of the drive, she flew low into
the nearby lot of yucca, cactus, piñon, night.
Aloud, I worried she would die. You assured
me there are plenty of birds with bad legs
who survive, though you couldn’t name
one. I did not argue, knowing then you
love me enough to soothe me with half-truths,
hold me, later, in bed, sweating where we
touch, ignore the pulse of fresh, red bites.
Dead Man’s Float
I’m writing a poem because it’s useless.
No money to be made, no publishers to court.
No student cruelty or apathy to stew.
A consequence of Jim Harrison calling to me
from a shelf of Crestone’s free-box.
That’s how it happens. Drive-by book-nappings.
I’m assuming the posture, as his title instructs,
on this first day home from the classroom.
Only two months to heal, put out new shoots
from withered roots. Broke, we begged for a lake.
They gave us a blue plastic kiddie pool.
Here’s my best dead man’s float.
Jim’s black letters serve as seeds. I scrawl
in a book Laurie collaged, faux antiqued pages,
her brush dipped in brown ink and dragged
across scalloped edges, spine bound with string.
My writing is how she reads me, dead as she is,
how she speaks to me, filters through Jim,
fellow Montanan. Huskily, surly, smoke curled.
Sit on the couch, Rachel. Read him, she says.
Float with me. Watch clouds roll in like motherships
over that flat peak, come for you like rain, winter,
instructions for Liberation in the Great Between
whispered in your ear. Notice the warble
of chickens through your walls, the rise and fall
of your dog’s chest. Sip coffee. Uninstall media.
And, for chrissake, stop thinking about teaching.