spring forward, fall back: what are you doing with your extra Hour,

he asked

She made a melody for lyrics she wrote, graded five essays, and

checked her email too many times for words that didn’t come.

She spoke of and sounded the letter H with her youngest son:

Hen, House, and Horse, of course. And didn’t

tell him of a man’s blue Hallelujah eyes, or his Hands

a fivefold Heaven on her Hips.  Instead, she Helped him circle

a Heart.  She also watched a House burn bright across

the prairie of night with her daughter.  Maybe she used

some of the Hour to pray.  For the inhabitants of the House,

and then for her elder son’s friend whose brain is angry with a Hundred

wires, right eye swollen, waiting for seizures to be incised from his life,

because wily electricity can be sliced off our bodies with scalpels.

She also captured vomit once in a bucket, and as she waited expectantly

for the second batch, she Heard from the son concerned with H’s

that throwing up is Hard.  Yes, it is, Honey, throwing up is Hard.

Later, she Hugged her Husband from behind, with Hidden tears,

as he listened to the song she played him all those years ago.

She remembered she loves him, touched by how he seeks to please her,

letting Hair Hang long down along and around his face like a silken windy

Halo.  In that Hour, she inhaled his neck, still Haunted by Hallelujah.  How?

Can her Heart ever be circled?  Hoping for her boys’ sleep, she read

of a fox tamed by a little prince whose Hair, the color of golden wheat,

made the fox Happy, made him anticipate. Then, as she read in bed, to only

herself, after setting her soothing zen alarm clock for Monday morning, thankful

for the extra Hour of sleep she would be getting, she instructed her daughter

to put a peeled clove of garlic in her Hurting ear, rather than rise, rather than

do it for her.  And she fell asleep unsure of where her extra Hour ended or began.

Rachel Kellum's poems have appeared in Barnwood Magazine, The Nieve Roja Review and Greyrock Review.  Two of her creative non-fiction pieces--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 for fourteen years and currently teaches writing, literature, humanities, and oil painting at Morgan Community College where the plains have curiously claimed her again.