poems by rachel kellum
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School Bus Geopolitics
A flying-white-silk-haired ten-year-old
announces to his class on the bus
that Germany has predicted WWIII
will break out this year. Nah,
a few friends reply, Nuh-uh.
Germany knows, Germany knows!
he insists. One of two adults on the bus,
I don’t know, haven’t read it.
Another boy looks to me, a question
in his eyes. I lean across the aisle,
I read a lot of trustworthy news,
I say, I haven’t seen this report.
He shifts in his seat, shifts his eyes,
repeats words that sound like something
he overheard his parents say
about our oligarch’s plans
to swipe up Greenland, rename the Gulf.
What an idiot, he says, What an idiot.
Effigy
Limestone
In the shape of a woman
Chiseled by economic necessity
Into a teacher
Where once was an easy smile
Cheerful eyes
Rain has chewed away three caves
Pitied, pitted
Pinpoints of sand
The eyes of children
Change in a blink
From liquid to fine grit
Lifted by wind gusting
Around her
Curated room
April 2024
hermitage of the furred ones
the dog and cat
live like a monk and nun
share a low bed
warmth, silence
long days, crawling light
something like love
Dear Danny,
I forgot I bought him the book.
First thing today, Grey texted six photos
of Jack’s “What Can I Say.”
A destiny read, he said.
Cage’s chance operations
Grey’s fingers on the edge
of morning pages, Amor Fati’s long spine
pried wide, at first I thought
his fingernails were mine.
Remember him?
Jack too large for the tiny screen
I grabbed my own worn copy
scanned the contents, page 66, read it
to Dorell steeping coffee in the kitchen.
Jack Fest program tucked in
Seven years ago, the night
you met Grey, just 18, at Lithic, you said
How are you or something and he said
Tired, life is long, and you said
in your slow, crooked-smile drawl
We can only hope, and he shrugged
the smallest shrug. Later that night
he hung briefly off his belt from rafters
in Wendy’s garage, pulled up
against gravity
with hard wiry arms. I wondered
why he wore his black hoody up
the next warm day, stacking a precarious cairn
on the edge of Trickster Ridge, a signpost to life:
Go any direction from here.
By miracle, Jack still holds Grey’s hand
in Leadville, sits here with me, in me
watching emptiness, like Wallace,
push snow off pinyon branches.
What can we say?
Because No Poem will be Read at Trump’s Second Inauguration, Here is Mine
Convinced by scientific TikTok evidence, my sons
believe the earth won’t sustain them as old men
Undeterred, one surfs wild rivers and steep snow slopes
Dante’s new Virgil, smiling guide to final earthly joys
The other builds gorgeous archaeologies of sound
ephemeral festival cities for the hopeful, the lost
My daughter fights fires, serves those bent by poverty
pours love into her infant, sparkling boy
My husband builds houses for Buddhist lamas, for peace
for the comfortable rich who cannot sleep
I teach children how to nurture worms, sprouts, compost
make murals for their greenhouse, useful clay cups
Hear this, you broken, misled, profit-blinded, king-minded hoard-men
We will not stop, we will never give up
Your four-year swansong will come to its natural end
I Pull Away from Screens like a Junkie, Reluctantly—
to wash the dog in October
tied to the sunny porch, drying out
barking as I go about filling buckets
to haul ten gallons of water
to five bickering chickens where I see
Brownie’s plucked feathers grew back
to yank blossom-end-rot tomatoes
off dwindling patio plants
before the others go bad too
to notice rusty hummers have moved on
and my troubled neighbor
must be drinking again by the sound of it
and my ear is still an echo chamber
hissing like a seashell I carry everywhere
an improvement over the usual sound
of distant heavy machinery in my head
as if men were shifting gears in me, moving dirt,
tearing up trees, pouring a concrete path through a forest
abandoning failed broken slabs
and bottles of yellow piss
on the shoulder of my wilderness
—the most anti-consumerist, purposeless
I’ve been in months, sitting here, scribbling this
watching the dog grow glossy
Raising Nightshades
All summer, every step into the greenhouse,
she trilled to her tomatoes, Hello, beautiful babies.
Finally, finally, come cooler fall,
shaking her head, she noted they’d been over-watered,
reset the timer to water them less often.
Surveying damage with the shame of a busy mother,
she harvested all the red cracked globes, too embarrassed
to offer the moldered surplus to colleagues.
She threw them out to compost, set to save the rest.
Their radial crusted cracks possible harbors of mold and rot,
she carved their tops like jack-o-lantern lids lifted by the stem.
She blanched, slip-skinned and cored them,
crushed the slick remains, stuffed basil into the boiling pot,
and canned three quarts of spaghetti sauce.
Knowing damn well the alkaloids will make her knees ache,
she vowed to eat her harvest anyway, in salsas too.
She’s sung to these tomatoes grown of saved seed,
and rising stiffly with a groan from a low couch,
she’ll wonder, How could my babies do this to me?
Antidotes for Fear of Losing Him
When I imagine him
hopelessly cold
as I go to spoon him
or gone too many hours
found clutching midnight’s
kettlebell
or the hammer dropped
just out of reach where he fell
or incomprehensibly
slouched beneath
a splattered piñon canopy
beloved calloused finger
stuck in the holy gun
I swallow tears
in my throat like medicine
imagine his ghost
next to me
in the half warm bed
spooning me spooning
the wet-necked shell of him
a nest holding a nest holding a nest
or his broad ghost back
and thick ghost biceps—
a sieve—straining to lift me
off the floor
Death is Taking Care of Us All
The shrunken mouse
in the drive
once looked into Her soft eyes
and huffed.
At Her empty breast,
mosquitos dried up
in August.
Where are their thready bodies?
In the bellies of birds.
My blood too
in the bellies of birds.
Where are their singing bodies?
Busy with their lavish harvest of piñon?
Languishing in 5G dreams?
Either way, my suet brick—untouched
for weeks at 20 degrees.