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Kelli Russell Agodon


The Quiet Collapse of the Dharma Shop

I celebrate small things 
            —apples, beetles, faith--
                        while inside my mind

there’s rattling, a broken stove
            of worry, a garden
                        of hissing snakes.

I can’t recognize the flowers.
            The plants are without names
                        (though their poisons still sedate).

​I left the garden during meditation—mosquitoes, ​         
            craneflies. But enlightenment?
                        Nowhere near my space.

Buddha. God. Universe. ​
            I charged spirituality
                        on my VISA

—a statue of Kuan Yin, prayer flags
            to hang across the gate. ​But what
                        might improve my mood is

a new bra and some bravery.
            Instead, I try on superstition, wear
                        a D-cup of doomed fate.

I mix religions—say chaos and calm, 
            corset, cheesecake--a smorgasbord
                        on my plate. I am the chainsaw

carving the toothpick. A lowercase sos. 
            Yesterday, I bought a silver cross.
                        Magic. Amulet. Saints.

I pray to anything these days--
            the plants without names, the beetles,
                        my garden of hissing snakes.

Coming Up Next: How Killer Blue Irises Spread
    --Misheard health report on NPR

It’s the quiet ones, the flowers
the neighbors said
kept to themselves,

Iris gettagunandkillus, shoots

and rhizomes reaching
beneath the fence.
The shifty ones,

Mickey Blue Iris, the tubers

that pretend to be dormant
then spread late night into
the garden of evil and no good.

They know hell, their blue flames

fooling van Gogh, the knife
he stuck into soil before he sliced
the bulbs in three, nights

he spent painting in a mad heat.

They swell before the cut
and divide of autumn. 
An entire field of tulips,

flattened. Daylilies found

like lean bodies across the path. 
The wild blue iris claims
responsibility, weaves through

the gladioli, into the hothouse

where the corpse flower blooms
for a single day, its scent
of death calling to the flies.

From the Handbook for Emergency Situations

When we were in love
I read you How to Survive If You Fall Through the Ice.

You were determined not to
listen.  You plugged your ears when I read,
Face the direction from which you came.

You told me love could be confused
with drowning.  I said, Use your elbows to lift yourself onto the edge of the hole.

You never wanted to live
that coldly.  You moved close, drank
peppermint tea. I read, Reach out

onto the solid ice as far as possible
.  
You said our chances were slim,
we lived in a temperate climate.

What if you knew then
that later we’d find reasons to dislike
each other’s sentences,  how many times

I’d look away when you wanted most
to meet my glance?  What if we knew
the instructions--Kick your feet

as though you were swimming and pull yourself up
—could be useful when we were breaking up?  
Or later, when we tried to reunite

how we should have listened--
Once on the icy surface, stay flat,

roll away from the hole
.
​

Melancholia

Violin sleep
            in the back of closets
next to a rack of wide ties
and rust-colored clogs.
Listen--
            at night you
can hear their strings

crying.


Picture
Picture

​Go to page 2 of Kelli Russell Agodon's poetry

Kelli Russell Agodon's Profile

Under the Covers We Find Jesus

Under the covers we find a picture of Jesus
and you say your mother was cleaning
the guest room,
                       cleaning and it must have fallen
from the wall.

           You say your mother, a neatnik,
was cleaning and she didn’t leave Jesus
in our bed as a reminder,  
                      the reminder we’re not married.

It’s not a sign of our soon-to-be sin,
Jesus in our bed, an accident, a misplaced Lord.

There is a small plastic Mary on the dresser.
           You say, If she wanted to scare us,
Mary would be upside down on the pillow.

Still, Jesus appeared in his thorny crown as I pulled
down the sheets, Jesus and his soft brown eyes,
           so welcoming,       so forgiving,

Jesus, sweet Jesus

with lips like yours, pink and ready to kiss
goodbye to this evening, this faithful evening
​
of figs left on the counter
by your mother, figs and a loaf of fresh bread
​           she baked with faithful hands.
​

A Mermaid Questions God

As a girl, she hated the grain of anything
on her fins. Now she is part fire ant, part centipede.
Where dunes stretch into pathways, arteries appear.
Her blood pressure is temperature plus wind speed.

Where religion is a thousand miles of coastline,
she is familiar with moon size, with tide changes.
She wears the cream of waves like a vestment,
knows undertow is imaginary, not something to pray to.

Now her questions involve fairytales, begin
in a garden and lead to hands painted on a chapel's ceiling.
She wants to hold the ribbon grass, the shadow of angels
across the shore. She steals a Bible from the Seashore Inn;

she will trust it only if it floats.

New Telescope

I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.
Sylvia Plath

She turned knobs all evening.

Still the telescope remained
unfocused on the powder
of a satellite, a blur:
a moon, a moth.

Open maps of craters
papered the earth.

Bats looped from treetop
to treetop.  She focused
full-attention—what was that?

A gunshot?  Imagine,

someone’s last sight—a clear night
and the halo of the moon. Or not.

A car backfired and a new galaxy
created from its exhaust. Clouds
appeared like curtains.

She aimed the scope at a star
with a name like Cancer or Columba,

or maybe she caught a plane
settling in the distance.

Her elbow slammed the tripod
and the telescope rocked,
reconnected with the earth.

Gravity-loving, sturdy little thing.

Through the eyepiece she peered
towards what she believed was Bliss
or Dove, jagged craters

sharpening one after another.

Blue

Because the dress was worn.
Or wasn’t.

A blue of forgetting.
A blue dress I might fold
in a basket and carry to the meadow.

The weathervane cannot tell me
if it will snow.

The blue isn’t
mine, but I wear it. Through

frost and foolishness,
a field of mourning,

a Sunday morning when I awoke
to learn she was
no longer.  Blue

dress of basket. Blue dress
of memory, hospital parking lot,
missing bead in my bracelet.

Because I was worn,
I slept in the car, maybe

the blue dress was a blanket, maybe
a pillow. I am a hollow-boned

bird in the meadow, blue wings
of my dress. Maybe a god of blue,
a lullaby of willow.

I run from myself, remove everything,
everything I can from my skin.

I raise the dress over my head

and it becomes my sky.

Go to page 2 of Kelli Russell Agodon's poetry
***


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