Frances Klein

Frances Klein (she/her) is an Alaskan poet and teacher writing at the intersection of disability and gender. She is the 2022 winner of the Robert Golden poetry prize, and the author of the chapbooks New and Permanent (Blanket Sea 2022) and the Best Secret (Bottlecap Press 2022). Klein currently serves as assistant editor of Southern Humanities Review.

Website: kleinpoetryblog.wordpress.com

Resume

After Michael Torres’ “Down II”

I put in two years at the Jack O’Lantern factory,
awarded nose-hole-cutter of the month
ten months running. I priced freight at a drugstore
where cruise ship workers bought instant noodles
by the pallet. I was Head Assistant to a reverse
pest removal expert, working overtime putting bats
and raccoons back in attics, coaxing possums
and skunks back under crawl spaces.
For a long time I’ve been angry.
One summer I was a living mandala,
folding t-shirts all day on one side of a table
while tourists unfolded them on the other.
If beauty is impermanence, my table and I
were the most beautiful couple the dock had ever seen.
I was a museum docent for a culture not my own,
telling stolen stories while the totems listened in.
I was a photo-model for an illustrated pain scale,
making every face from 1 to 10,
no acting required. I was an apprentice librarian,
new to Dewey’s ways. Once I went on vacation—
so my coworkers say—working from home
for a seven pound boss, on call as a living buffet
all hours of the day and night.
Then I was a professional bathroom poet,
hired by the coolest bars and coffee shops
to cover low lit stalls in clean limericks
for obscene prices. I have frequently been
a complication, a wrench in the spokes.
I was an AM DJ, spinning theories into facts
after midnight, giving equal air time to Sasquatch
truthers and moon landing deniers. I keep applying
for a position at the All Better Business Bureau,
any opening, any department: Miraculously Healed,
Finally Over It; I even put in for an entry-level spot
in Road to Recovery. I leveraged every relationship,
networked my ass off, called in every favor.
All my resumes bounced back, the rejections kind
but dismissive: you’ll be a great candidate, they say,
once you get some experience.

Ode to Jeopardy

I want to write a timeless love poem, but I’m finding
I was born much too late to say anything original or new.
5,000 years too late, to be specific,

losing that race to the Mesopotamians,
river-dwellers whose pictographs recorded
harvest yields and tax ledgers, the love letters

of a gentle reminder to pay the emperor his due
before a tough love visit from his enforcers.
The Rosetta stone itself, great slate key to the past,

is a love letter to Ptolemy V, who loved himself so much
he had his birthday wishlist set in stone across Egypt.
The love letter you wrote me last night is in the pocket

of my purse, waiting to be read under
the sensual fluorescents of the frozen food aisle.
Anyone who doesn’t think a grocery list can be

a love letter has never had the person they love
let them go to bed early while they stay up writing
the love letter of pickles and milk, the love letter

of lite salt and russian dressing, the letter
of apology they will accept without comment
when their love comes home again sans shallots,

since they’ve never learned what they are and love
pride too much to learn now. If our love had a song
it would be the wordless half-minute played

during Final Jeopardy, the contestants sweating
under stage lights. This is when we make time
to sit together hand in hand. We carve out

a half hour each evening after
work cares have been set aside, the kitchen
cleaned, our boy shuffled into his room with a book

and a toy and another toy and a kiss and perhaps
one more. We make time, together, to watch
other people answer life’s great questions,

the tension of wagers and outcomes lessened
to mere entertainment by the fact that, while
they seek their answers, we have found ours.