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Rachel Kellum
Buddha Woman Speaks and Surrenders, Again
Oh, it is you again
standing here within me,
dancing the darkest moon of my dish
washing, gnawing my hipped belly bowl
promising blood.
You tango through the terror
of my uninhabited dreams, rip
the seams of me where these
clothes don’t fit, haven’t fit
for years of moons at many sinks.
I try not to think about it, but you,
Blood Woman, you needle
to keep me true to who
I think I am, or wanted to be,
but I am always changing, see?
We never agree. You say throw the plates!
I say make them gleam.
I am tired of our existential arguing.
Of cutting myself in pieces for your uses:
Mother, writer, sister, teacher, lover, painter, blue.
You are ruthless, refuse to let me lose these faces.
If only we could multiply our tongue by two!
If only they could flap at once,
in absolute and relative bliss,
Laughing: this/not this! this/not this!
But you won’t have it.
You insist: this, this, this!
I can’t resist. I drop a dish.
because iphones are poems, and i held yours
i want to slide my thumbs
across the screen of you, outward, opening
and opening into hidden windows, rolling
vistas and whispered songs where secret codes linger:
username: hauntingly_familiar@crestone.com
password: hello_ my god
intuitively, i would go.
in one window there would be space
for us to sing and spread
hot sauce across the lips
of countless tacos, abolishing hunger.
in another: the crimson heart of desert fields
with no roads and a waning gibbous morning
moon promising more than future fullness.
i would glide into and through the
labyrinthine libraries of your mind,
run my fingers down electric spine upon spine,
and never tire, invite you into mine,
already you’ve found the door in,
my margins awaiting your eyes.
click shrine and find adorned dakini breasts,
bejeweled beneath thangkas
of majestic blue cocks
dancing in flame, blaming no one
for too much attachment, allowing longing.
further in: a room of beds with singing springs
no one would hear but us, springs shrieking,
screaming wild with our choked breath
and shocked eyes and golden light beaming
shooting, streaming from pores, and more.
more, there would be more places
than we can fathom from this place
where massive indifferent thumbs
of circumstance slide inward
and inward across you, across me, across
a bench by a moonlit stupa, receding,
receding, the print too small to read,
my thumbs too small to reach the screen,
farther away than my hips can comprehend
circumambulating the memory of your hands,
turning and turning toward you, this heart
looking for your gentle thumbs,
but the sky, abundantly prudent,
has swallowed you whole.
©2008 by Rachel Kellum
Rachel Kellum's poems have appeared in Barnwood Magazine, The Nieve Roja Review, Greyrock Review, and Blood Lust. Her creative non-fiction -- childbirth narratives that resist and
revise the technocratic language of birth -- are featured in the book, Journey into Motherhood.
An Illinois native, Kellum has lived in Colorado fourteen years, and currently teaches writing, literature,
humanities, and oil painting at Morgan Community College, where the plains have curiously
claimed her again. Her visual art can be viewed online at Rachel
Kellum Fine Art.
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