poems by rachel kellum
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On Praying
I am not in his body but I made his,
so when I am woken at 2 am the night of my wedding
by a cacophony of voices I quickly realize
are only his one voice, sobbing, outside a window,
reciting a prayer for the people of Gaza,
shouting the borrowed words to a Lord
not our family’s own, but someone’s good Lord,
his upturned face aglow below the moon of his phone,
I go to him. Shhhhhhhh and worry when he cries
into my neck that he cannot not do something, he will,
this man who would offer his life to the void for less
than a people, who would trade the body I made
for justice, retribution, peace, limbless children,
wailing mothers, brothers, husbands, sisters,
sons, daughters, fathers, wives, grandmothers,
grandfathers, aunts and uncles, nieces, nephews,
friends and lovers, all digging through rubble with rough,
bleeding hands. If only he could throw himself, dark angel,
upon the ones responsible, if such multilocation,
such proximity, were possible. What can I tell you, son?
I, too, pray, in my own helpless way, wrapping
a borrowed printout of an ancient prayer and
sandalwood mala around a conman’s ridiculous book
about the art of the deal, as though human lives
were cards to play, shuffle into his pack of lies.
As though words and wooden beads could restrain him.
I tuck between the beads and book an amulet:
plastic card of a wrathful, azure goddess, three faced,
canines bared, tongues out, fierce eyed, wild haired,
crowned with skulls, adorned with a necklace of ego’s heads,
engulfed by a full body halo of flames, riding
a black mule with snake halter and reins, mounted
atop the skin of a corpse—impermanence. Her six hands
lift aloft an axe, skull cup of blood, wisdom mirror
at her heart, flaming sword, dagger—cutting knots
of illusion, the poisons of greed, hatred and ignorance.
Above it all: her victory banner, whipping in the wind.
They would call her demon. She is taking her time.
The world is tired of praying. The deities are tired
of waiting for us to wake up, become them.
synchronicity, our dragon telepathy
in dark retreat you
witness lotus dragon bloom
gaze into your eyes
darting back and forth
pink ribbon rippling through space
she swallows sadness
crosses miles, alights
on my ball cap brim, says hi
a huge dragon fly
(or maybe, reverse:
I see the Darner, say hi
and she delivers)
for Dorell Drake, my husband—whose name is marvelously rooted in the Latin “draco,” for dragon.
Let’s have some more fun with etymology… and entomology: The dragonfly who landed on my brim was a Variable Darner, or Aeshna interrupta. Aeshna originates in Sanskrit and means “desire or wish” and interrupta is Latin for “interrupted.” Interrupted Desire, what a perfect description of being apart from one’s beloved. Aeshna interrupta: what a perfect messenger to connect us.
Instructions for Shining
Sit still in any pose with a mind
for your body’s preferences and needs.
Notice where gravity presses against you.
Disappear just above it.
Find open silence holding the hum
of the electric heater,
the oven fan cooling after biscuits.
Silence doesn’t fight noise.
It is a mother with the world
squirming on its lap.
Feel your chest soften—
butter melting, sun breaking open
above the peak, a crumb at a time
before whole radiance.
How long can you shine on everything,
everything, before you shift
to pick up the sock, the pen?
late Februrary 2026
Surrogates
After they all left home I started
making altars of their favorite childhood books
beloved things charged with small fingers
innocent curiosity, and little gifts
they gave me: silver Ganesha pendant
wire-wrapped and naked stones
Mercury dime to replace the one
I found in the garden years ago
that one of the boys lost.
Altars because I couldn’t hold them,
daily behold them, couldn’t protect them
from wanting to die inside their minds.
Through shrines I slowly learned
to banish fear, the illusion of control
from my bones, shoulders, nerves, gut
like a Catholic with her rosary and saints
like a witch with amulets and milk spells.
I perched their weathered books,
spines draped in rinpoches’ red strings
upon the cliffs of my own bookshelf
their covers theatrical backdrops
for miniature, plasticized thangkas
of loving mother deities, placid
and sharp-toothed, wild-eyed mothers
alongside family heirlooms
from the boys’ paternal grandfather
who entrusted me with antique relics—
little clay and brass buddhas from
his tour in Thailand, my favorite
the one with a bone inside you can hear
when you shake it like a rattle, that bone
some kind of promise. It’s the kind of thing
you might laugh and shake your head
about when I’m not around, or dead
or until you have adults of your own.
You can laugh. But know: I’ve seen what praying
with too many words and worry has done
to my mother’s nerves and night dreams
as if she thinks, falling asleep on her knees
her God needs a mother, a reminding, a litany
to help him log her children’s trials, the help we need.
My style is silence and effigy. Let the altars
do their thing, like clay proxies propped
in ancient Mesopotamian temples
their robbed, disproportionately large eye sockets
empty or, incredibly, full of alabaster with black
limestone or lapis pupils, pinpoints sipping
a confounding light, Goya eyes unblinking
before the gods of tragedy, hands folded
across their chests or abdomens
in surrogate supplication while their humans
went about their little lives, too fragile to rise
from bed, to work and worry at the same time.
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
Take You There
There is another book,
quite forgotten now,
or was it a robin?
I was hanging there
when it hit the window.
Appreciate that particular
detail, the smudge
and fluff on the pane.
Too bad if the action
moves out of the visual
field. The limp bird
can’t tell you, just
take you there.
You shall, neither of you,
have anything of mine,
the red breast said,
dizzy with haranguing
heart and the whald’s
trivialitah. Some thinkers,
large and small, ignore
these interruptions,
all a trick, these hoops
and games, to make
you quit, an escape valve,
a low place to sit.
Elegy for Ava
Remember when you were young.
You shone like the sun.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
~David Gilmour, Roger Waters, Richard Wright
A gently curled smile upon her face,
lids parted in soft, spacious gaze, rose petals
strewn across her tiny form and way,
Ava—drifting like fog along the lowest horizon,
skirted by love, the sturdy hands of six sisters—
passed us on the stone lined path. We followed,
encircled her, held onto each other in October
chill, beheld her wrapped in purple on the pyre.
Four friends stepped out from our circle,
lowered four torches to windows, lit her final bed
from four directions, my brother in the east.
In wait, split logs lay beneath the grate. Others
were leaned like gates against her body,
a modesty, a drape for eventual bones.
In adolescence, the voice of wood cracked,
stood up tall, orange, ravaged her edge, crawled
and licked and spit black coals around a swirling
grey green spiral of smoke lifting languorously
from the center of the pyre. Subterranean viscera,
slowly igniting, finally caught up to rhyme
with the metaphor of her life. Smoke dancing now,
child spinning for joy of dizziness, whirling dervish,
palm up, turning, turning to find the still point
of a god inside, still point of a wolf woman’s eye,
wildness vaporized, rising up from the muddy earth
of her, now a roaring chorus of sunny tongues
reaching, singing the huge bonfire she always was,
released to bend cold air. Her final watery mirage
smoothed to clear space, blue sky, invisible stars.
Our black coats begged the sun.
Feet ice blocks, arms around my lover,
my dearest love, whose quaking stilled
in our embrace, his heart a drum
against my ear, I prayed for more life, more heat,
longed to stand closer to Ava, dreamed
of lounging by her: shoes off, feet naked,
as close to the flame as I could bear,
wondering if my animal prayer was sacrilege
or reverence. But then, the invitation came.
“Come,” the woman said, “Come closer. Enjoy
Ava’s warmth.” Our circle tightened inward,
innocent as moths. Her generous heat glowed
across sighing faces, chests and limbs,
surpassed the weak sun behind us, just above
the eastern peaks, foil to the full moon
in the west. I offered Ava my back,
and to the sun, my squinting eyes. Ava won.
Stories went round. Pagans howled. Buddhists
bowed. Mostly, for hours, all stood silent, humbled,
proud of our friend. It’s all love, she had said.
Oh! to witness this wondrous woman burn!
One day would come our turn to watch
the other become light. Soon, a small white dome
appeared near the end of the pyre: her skull,
I presumed, crown too perfect in circumference
to be wood. I thought of all the hands of family—
born, chosen, beloved Scot—who stroked
that lovely head in life, in vigil, offered comfort
as she died. A fire keeper finally laid more logs
to fill that glowing door, a wooden veil,
one of a hundred falling veils. I believe Ava
would not have minded being that naked before us,
as naked as her stories, the one a self-professed
best friend of countless best friends told
in which she walked in childlike innocence
the last months of her life, bare breasted
in her diaper at a campground when a family
pulled up in the next lot, shy and shocked.
“Honey, maybe you should cover up.”
“Huh?” Ava responded, bent over, tidying
the table, uncomprehending. “You know,” the friend
reminded her, tenderly, “others are not as open
as we are.” “Oh, ok,” Ava said, nonchalantly slipping
the fabric over her thin arms, her shining head.
In commemoration of the open air cremation of Grace Ava Swordy, 21 Oct. 2021
Hagstone
On the beach we all have a knack for something.
My son in law skips stones six leaps across a thinning surf.
My husband harbors inner heat despite the wind.
With ease I find black stones with holes clear through
where witches live, my daughter says, and laughs.
Her gifted ears are fine tuned to tumbling staffs
of waves crashing in multi-phonic whispers and roars.
Harmonics hum along this stretch of sand, lost on me.
My ever gulping pupils ignore my poor ears, grow
lost in mirages of hands and feet burning in the campfire,
wood mimicking bone, an archeology of grain
that striates everything, as though the whole
earth were breathing inside a set of giant, fractal ribs
spinning out the endless chests of gulls, men, fish,
metastasized hotels, pretty cages glowing along
the coast like mammoth corpses or gum-receded teeth.
Red logs remind me how many degrees my bones
will reach on the path to ash, ash my family may choose
to suspend in blown glass, spun globes to place on desks
as paperweights, or shelves as funerary art or shrines
beneath thangkas of Tapihritsa where I may serve
as a reminder, a gutted clock. Perched on a mirror base,
plugged in, LED lit, five alternating colored lights
shining through what’s left of me, a tiny spiral galaxy—
starry crumbs of my body glowing in vitreous space
like Tibetan thigles—to everyone’s surprise I will be
not quite a comfort, not quite discomfiting.