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the poet
Alaskan poet and teacher Frances Klein is the author of poetry collection Another Life and chapbook (Text) Messages from The Angel Gabriel. A founding editor of Flight: A Literary Sampler, she also edits The Weight Journal. Frances' flash fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including Best Microfiction 2024, The London Magazine, Rattle and The Harvard Advocate.
the poems
Another Life
Public Works is deconstructing with mathematical precision
a massive maple that threatens the telephone lines, branches
leaning in to eavesdrop on million-dollar deals and petty gossip.
Men stand at the base, arrayed around a machine thrum-rumbling
with hungry insistence. Their eyes guide the loop that will steady
each branch for the saw, moving easily as a needle seeking thread.
My son watches from his perch in the bucket swing.
He gives equal attention to machine, loop, and saw,
to the limb that slips its binding and daggers earthward
toward one of the men, the young one who keeps tucking dark curls
under his hardhat only to have them escape time and again
like unruly children. The man dives out of the way just in time,
finding ground in a fountain of mulch.
There are seven alternate universes where the tree flourishes,
left to its own devices. Generation of children trying and failing
to reach its upper branches, dozing between cradling roots,
saying marriage vows in front of its broad trunk, leaves throwing
themselves from their branches in celebration.
There are twenty-three worlds where the man is fixed
like a showcase beetle to the earth; twelve others where
the bucket swing I push is empty. I wanted another life,
but this one has a dead stump, a living boy. This life holds me
like a loop around a tree limb, keeping me here in this world
where my son reaches up to be lifted from the swing,
where we go back together, my husband
spreading his maple-wide arms to welcome us home.
Better Half
A confession: I do things in half measures.
Half the dishes washed, pots and pans abandoned
to soak in lukewarm water, the night half over and half the wine drunk.
Guests collecting coats, calling cars, the few that remain
the same ones who showed up half an hour early
to set the table, to be handed a broad wooden spoon
for making slow half-circles in the risotto: here, stir.
I've half the children I should have,
which is to say I have one.
I am half as able as I once was,
hand twice as tight on the railing,
eyes measuring the distance and halving it
so that I might make it back undoubled.
When I practice our arguments I speak like a dinosaur
skeleton in a museum, bones of the battle half real, half fabricated.
I’ve read only half the books on our shelves,
but isn’t that marriage?
We come to union asking to be halved,
our burden reduced, each of us lifting one end
of the old yellow couch as we take it to the curb,
half-bickering about who brought it in
half a lifetime ago, wholly uninterested in the answer.
Unfinished Ars Poetica
I am writing a poem about my son standing on the tee ball field while the rain pours
like some giant
faucet has been broken above the clouds.
In the poem, my body chills in sympathy with my muscles' stored memories of my own
sodden games
where I fielded and hit and caught and threw from the bottom of the ocean.
I need a title, one that strikes as true as a fly ball
descending from the cover of clouds on some unsuspecting child,
and an opening line that captures the bone cold of it all, the way my son eventually gives up
on hats and hoods and bares his head to the sky, water darkening his hair.
I need a middle stanza that sums up the way my skin remembers
drops turning to rivulets turning to rivers running down the nape of my neck
and into my shirt collar, how the only way to stand it was to decide to love
the suffering. By the third inning,
I don’t have an almost-end for the poem I have not written, no volta to layer my son’s
experience over my own
like the transparency pages of my mother’s old medical textbook,
where each layer added to the body: bones, then organs, then the intertwined blues
and reds of veins and arteries. But
the game is ending. Here comes my son, soaked and pink-cheeked and beaming, and
surely what’s unfinished will wait.
Publishing credits
Another Life: Another Life (Riot in Your Throat Press)
Better Half: Miniskirt Magazine
Unfinished Ars Poetica: exclusive first publication by iamb