poems by rachel kellum
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Stalagmite
Dark thoughts drip
Stalactite
Finger, fang, bud
Of child’s first
Top tooth
A dark twin forms
Below
Reaches up
Fills the gap
My heart
God’s finger finally
Touches Eve’s
Coyote takes her first bite
Hungry infant bleeds
Mother’s breast
Sand Burial
Before tractors buried my father
who would have loved to watch the work
of those machines, earthmovers, like himself—
the way good men pulled levers to lift his vault lid,
suspended like a Frank Lloyd Wright cantilever
hovering over the eternal balcony of death,
that bardo where inside marries outside,
and lowered one end perfectly above him
until one lip slipped into the vault’s rim
and made the opposite end quaver
(That’s how you know male meets female,
the undertaker said with pride in his men,
artists, he called them, for knowing
the subtle arts of the trade: See, that’s when
they know the concrete seam will seal, their signal
to lower the lid the rest of the way)—
I stood with Sam in his grandpa’s Quicksilver cap,
grey hairs and spiced sweat still in the band,
threw fistfuls of Utah sand into the hole
then shovelfuls, to finally let his chronic absence go,
resurrecting now the memory of that day my father
fished small grains of Illinois sand from my red eyes
with tissue he had wadded to a point,
that tenderness, the lingering sting.
two pruning haiku
dusty pungent stalks
last year’s crop of Russian sage
fall to my quick blades
* * * * *
sneeze, gather white twigs
living ten of wands woman
my burden is light
Fluxus Score: Instructions for a Couple Over Unknown Duration
1.
Observe his plate of tater tots
while you wait to pray.
Listen to his heavy stream across the house
the water course through pipes
his feet return, full of him. Pray.
2.
Sit in silent witness
of creosote collecting
on the wood stove pane.
Take turns placing your palm
on each other’s thigh.
3.
Nearly halfway
through duration
begin cold plunging.
Gasp together until
a calm carries.
3.
Giggle and kiss each other once again
just to upset the whimpering dog
who wants a kiss goodbye, too
every morning, not jealous of him
but you who gets his first kiss.
4.
Each of you, nearly alternately
lay a log on the fire when coals begin
to die, open the flue until flames rise.
Keep each other warm like this
until your last winter.
5.
Notice when the other
makes the bed, sweeps
cooks, waters seeds
takes out trash.
Say something.
6.
Moan into each other’s ears.
7.
Walk the short loop,
the mid loop, the long loop
for as long as the dog lives.
Notice together or alone
the walk takes you home.
Eclipse ‘24, for Grey, 24
He has sought
the path of totality,
my son.
He has built
an infrastructure
to worship it,
laid down ropes of power
for the festival.
He will stand beneath
the darkened sun
whole.
He knows now,
it doesn’t last long.
I know now,
he will come home.
A raven will shout
something dark
about awe.
Sacred Masculine, 2023, collage, Rachel Kellum
Crossing Tacoma Bridges with My Pregnant Daughter
I notice moss in the cracks of the peeling white footbridge.
Its wooden arms reach across the tracks of trains
that crawl through the belly of Titlow Park. We stop,
hands on the railing, look down, look into the woods
where tracks disappear, look through foliage to the Sound.
Days later, on another walk over Narrows Bridge, I notice twin
crisscross symmetries of early metal towers perched on piers
mirroring newer concrete ones; sage green suspension cables—
sloped, parallel, curving pipes she says her family of firefighters
climb, clipped into handrails, to the tops of tower saddles
where they rappel to the Sound to practice emergency
rescue. It is my privilege to notice only moss and eras
of architecture after a bridge has collapsed, to feel my nerves
jolt with the thought of her precarious ascents and descents.
Beneath, or perhaps, transparently overlaid like thin skin
upon these rare moments of our togetherness, my daughter
also sees bodies leapt upon tracks, a beloved, sad dispatcher
scattered by a train, crushed women and men floating
on the Sound that rushed up like pure despair, that liquid body
like unforgiving, then forgiving, concrete. Every so many yards,
a sign is posted on the bridge that makes a promise:
“There is always hope,” followed by a number to call
that ends with TALK. We don’t. Standing there, suspended,
we span memories of a bullet hole in a wooden floor,
a hoodie pulled up to spare our eyes a rope burned neck.
We take in the view of the ragged, verdant shore, our ears
lashed by traffic’s knives. She says, “I can still hear the frogs….
Listen, what is that called?” Susurrus, I say. We pause. Listen.
“Through the Woods,” by Jason Abington
photo by Carson Diaz
Lines Before Dawn
When the house is no longer simply a place where I wake
to get ready for work, a launch pad to a school—
and instead, by leisure, has become a dark sky twinkling
constellations of sleeping machines, bright clusters
of red, white, green and blue lights, and I have wandered
into my youngest grown son’s room to find a black hole
where no light switches or charging phones glow—it is time
to step out onto the peeling deck with my forgotten feet,
thin socked, my mother’s silent, soft blanket wrapped around me.
No swishing materials of my body to steal peace, I look up.
Deep space offers its trail of ancient smoke and tiny stars.
Planets I can’t name are aligned, planets I learned earlier online.
There they are. Two meteors draw their lines across the night
like a sweet girl drawing then erasing her marks.
Size 14 Secret Security
Her love has left his giant boots
in the foyer
for as long as she’s known him.
Clutter, she always thought,
another thing to put in order
until the day he told her
he leaves them where
the window in the door
affords a view to a warning.