MEGAN KLCO

Home Body

Poems by Megan Klco Kellner

The Chord My Body Makes

A friend said the key to learning to play guitar 

is you have to accept 

that you’ll never be great at it

I bought some pears that stayed hard for weeks

then wrinkled on the kitchen table

I am worried I am not doing this right

It is possible for me to lose myself, rarely 

singing in unison, scrubbing the kitchen sink, laying 

forehead to forehead in my daughter’s bed

Most of the time, though, 

I am the rootbound elephant ear I unpotted this spring,

a tangled mat of white tendrils

mapping the shape of my container

I like the story about divinity being held in a giant cup 

that shattered, or split maybe, 

the way a cattail spurts a million silk feathers 

when you part its felt between your fingers

I pause for a moment at the table

lifting my coffee cup, 

the cartoons chattering in the living room,

and suddenly hear the chord

my body makes

the trembling of my fingers against the heavy mug

the rocking rhythm of my breath

how it makes me sway slightly

like a string that's been plucked

my shadow ticking back and forth,

long on the linoleum

Bedtime

I’m wrestling my six-year-old again

pinning his wriggling body under my forearm

begging him to brush his teeth

Today my three-year-old drew herself

as a tangle of sharp, pink scribbles

I am always trying to smooth them together 

the way my mother mended a frayed string

by rolling it between her lips

welding the ragged ends into a point 

that could be threaded 

On the TV, the Coyote has turned himself

into a cloud of whirling arms and legs

his yellow eyes bulged forward,

slack tongue dangling

It is always like this and we are tired

When the kids finally fall still at night we sit

and stare stubbornly at our phones

trying to make our brains take in some news

One hundred children are dead in Ukraine

while ours are upstairs sleeping

In the bedroom, after I’ve washed my face,

there’s a bright, white oval glowing  

where a mirror’s caught the light from the hall

In the dark it looks like a reverse version

of one of those ACME holes

the Coyote is always stumbling into,

his fingers red from pinching the crackling wick

of yet another stick of TNT

Tonight the Road Runner snatched the hole in its beak, 

dragged it like a limp tablecloth onto the asphalt

Our kids squealed when the Coyote floated a second

in the air above that lightless spot,

stared forward, frowned, and waved

Kitchen Table Inventory

One wet straw wrapper 

two Halloween stampers, one crooked in its little cap

two dirty medicine syringes from my daughter’s ear infection 

one half-eaten cup of dried up instant oatmeal, mottled blue 

like the bruise above my son’s eye he got

when someone whacked him with a hula hoop, abundant glitter

fused to the yellow tabletop enamel that’s worn gray

in front of each of our chairs set in their places, scratched 

to the metal where we settle our forks, one monster

cobbled together from paper egg cartons and 

popsicle sticks frowning face-down into a dishrag

two red plastic missiles, one winter hat, in the drawer

if you could pull it open, cartoons

scratched in pen, the words Justin and Josh

and an old phone number scrawled large 

and crooked, countless sheets 

of silver stickers that come free with address labels,

stuck too, on the tabletop

the dishwasher, the fridge, worn down 

to their felty backs like skin on the linoleum, that drawer 

always wanting to open, to spurt 

like an unpinched hose up through the drop ceiling, 

freckling the cabinets

with shiny-eyed puppy dogs, Wildlife Fund pandas, to spread 

like my kids spread their arms in the morning,

like they run with their heads tossed back, yell 

with their mouths open, greet

the soft space of the kitchen: a cotton-lined pocket to be filled.

Thoughts While Walking 
I am trying really hard not to write poems

but to let thoughts paddle on the surface of my mind a little longer.

Lucy the vulture was absent from her dirty bath towel

this morning at the nature center. Charles kicked up the wood chips.

On a podcast I heard someone say I try to examine

the feeling behind each action. If it’s fidgety desperation, I don’t do it.

I laid in the bath and listened to the furnace hum a little longer.

Charles told me, lifting the mayapples’ droopy umbrellas to check

for ovoid fruits, Charles told me he doesn’t belong at school.

When I came down to the kitchen this morning, he’d tied yarn 

from the cabinets to the ceiling fan in dozens of directions.

I rub my thumb over the back of his hand while we walk

and remember how you’d watch for warblers in the underbrush for hours.

I would desperately like to keep loving you.

This spring the magnolia bloomed in lopsided bunches, but mealworms

squirmed by the dozens in the crumbs underneath our childrens’ car seats.

This is the same nature center where my mom used to scoop scum

from the creek into a white enamel pan so we could see what was wriggling.

I used to think you wanted to open the world, slowly, 

as if unpeeling an orange. I wanted to watch while you did it.

I have video of both of you, you and Charles, with your palms open.

A trembling warbler on its back, a folded scarf, till it explodes in flight.

I squeeze Charles’ hand and tell him That is hard. It is hard. 

On the creek the water striders are dancing, making tiny, shining dimples.

I Was Born to Delight

I have yet to make a living from quietly looking at things

winding clementine peel, cracked cuticle, dust

what a waste 

of my most natural and abiding skillset

I was born to delight

in freeing a warm egg from its shell

in how the morning swells with it

wet and firm in my fingers

so that when I also wipe the countertop

scrape butter, brush my daughter’s hair

I am splitting that milky flesh 

between my thumbs again

forcing a cloud break 

in white overcast 

yellow sun magic

January jewel

Abundance

Old friend, I thought of you 

while my kids were terrorizing a quiet poetry reading. 

No matter how many grapes I shoved into my son’s mouth 

it wasn’t enough to keep him from shouting words he didn’t know 

as questions: APARTMENT? LILAC? GREIF? Out of nowhere

I remembered speeding away from the Aldi’s dumpster in a sedan 

packed with Wonder Bread, the way you laughed with your whole 

body shaking like my daughter’s does when she’s begging to nurse. 

You wrote that you were getting free that year

and it’s true that we walked home barefoot at sunrise

but also that you dragged me out of bed on my birthday

and forced me to brush my hair. 

I have had so many mothers. 

I got a sour look from the author when she walked back 

from the podium and slugged her paper cup of chamomile tea. 

On my turn I tried to joke you might have noticed I have kids here 

but my daughter heard my voice at the mic and wailed and, god, 

you would have loved it! – all their somber faces caught in hooks 

as if they’d never been young

as if they’d only ever thought about loss 

and never abundance

as if June bugs never shelled their windows

like they did at our house in Missouri, shedding their bodies –

those generous jewels! As if they never scrubbed handprints 

from countertops and doorknobs, never felt their own wildness 

wriggling in their children’s limbs that made them remember 

piling over long-legged friends, tangling in each other's hair 

hugging stolen, tossed-out bread just giddy 

with the thought of weeks of spreading Jiff on toast! 

Measure the Year

Wasps hatched from holes in the ground

A coworker’s chimney filled up with bees

Something killed all the new growth on the viburnum, 

scorched the tender leaves

I tried to keep track of the bloom cycles in April but only recorded two dates

How come the wrens didn’t come back this year? 

How are we different? 

Mail slides in through the slot on the door and spreads along the floor 

Left alone, it would pile like sand in an hourglass 

We could measure a year in the height of damp pennysavers

At the Zoo on Mother’s Day

I am trying to be good in the fashion of our star magnolia

whose whirling, crystalline asymmetry pushes each bloom into sunlight in its turn.

At the zoo, we watch a squat orangutan lick the last drops 

from a tube of Go-Gurt, while my daughter sucks her fingers, grips my neck.

A mother says I will have shame 

for as long as my parents are alive and Catholic.

The trees are absurdly generous: new leaves and cherry blossoms, 

chartreuse, pink, bright as the pompoms my kids call warm fuzzies. 

I press two into their palms for sticking tightly to my body. 

At home they’ll plop them into glass jars on their cluttered bedroom dressers.

I told my mom I am an atheist 

and the word split wood.

I would like to be a bed of purple hyacinths. I am much more like 

the sparrow circling the concrete ceiling in the aviary, heart racing. 

There was a priest who used to lift kids by their biceps in the classroom

so their chests expanded open and they couldn’t breathe with their legs dangling.

My kids watch the orangutans swing from one net to another. The little one

disappears in a tunnel, then slinks out hugging his blue blanket.

We have not seen the sun in seven weeks.

My kids scream and squeal and fight and run with their arms open in it.

My girl says you still love us even when we make bad choices.

She is tugging at my earlobe. Her warm body is a psalm.

I am trying to be good the way the blooms are good.

I press my palm against my daughter’s back to feel her breathing.

Keeping Records

We are dreaming of traveling to Egypt

to look for evidence that there were lives like ours

centuries ago, their color stained into sandstone

stacked on the opposite end of the ocean. 

This is how it looks here, now: 

red ketchup leather

shriveled scrambled eggs, a slurry in the dishwater. 

Egyptians didn’t have snow, either

a months-long metronome outside the kitchen window.

It makes the birds fight restlessly.

Our children, too, who name them, pointing: 

junco, cardinal, downy woodpecker. 

Our gift will be the names they still remember.

In spring I will teach them 

trout lily, bloodroot, false solomon seal. 

Things without names vanish.

Prickling heat, sud nebulas, my smile 

contorted in the stainless steel. I can’t hold

any of this. Our daughter’s voice, 

your shoulders hunched over your cereal, 

our son screaming, this yellow morning.

The birds are crazed with scarcity. 

Their footprints fluff apart each time 

they lift their bodies from the deck rail.

I have held one in my hand once

all warmth and trembling.

Heartbeat like a clutched breath

my prickling fingers

throbbing in the dishwater.