Frances Klein

Secondary Infertility, or
The Best $52,237 Dollars I Ever Spent

An erasure of Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid

I had
given up

dreams

Good or bad,

Paul
eventually made it possible

we got
what money can buy

maybe that’s enough

Self Portrait as an Alphabet Book

/I apple slice and appetite/I bottle and betray/I coddle and
cookie, chase and count/I diaper and doubt/I elephant noise,
I earache/I fever and frustration/I grind, I ground/I
horseback ride, I seek and hide, I hurt and hurt/I leave ice
sharp shards of myself in each corner/I jail and Judas/I
kindle and knaw/I lemon juice and lavender oil/I mother
and meaning/I puddle and push/I quit, I can’t/I read and
rust, return to dust/I slide, I stone/I toy car and train track/I
udder, I umbilical/I valley and mountain for you/Whom do
I betray? You, you, you/I exhale and excise/I yellow, I
yearn/I zephyr, I scour every sign of the zodiac for you,
you, you/

Frances Klein (she/her) is a poet and teacher writing at the intersection of disability and gender. She is the author of the chapbook New and Permanent (Blanket Sea 2022) and The Best Secret (Bottlecap Press 2022). Klein currently serves as assistant editor of Southern Humanities Review. Readers can find more of her work at https://kleinpoetryblog.wordpress.com/.