March 20, 2023
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Another Life
By Francis Klein
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Another Life
By Francis Klein
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 gossips. 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 this nature video in reverse 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, coming to ground in a fountain of mulch.
There are seven alternate universes where the tree flourishes, left to its own devices. Generations of children trying and failing to achieve 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, my arms wrapped around my hollowness. Am I weeping? I am weeping. I wanted another life, but this one has a dead stump, a living boy. This one sends the man home to his husband, sheetfaced, to be kissed back into our world.
Francis Klein
Frances Klein (she/her) is a 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.
Follow her on Twitter @fklein907 or IG @fklein907
Image description: A selfie-style closeup photo of poet Frances Klein, a white woman with shoulder-length, wavy brown hair. She is wearing a dark green sweater and a necklace with blue and green glass beads. In the back behind her, slightly blurred, is the front porch of a house, with a door and two windows visible in the background.