After the Kaiju

rain fills the footprints that march down the broad avenue

a trail of reflecting pools in which pigeons duck and drink

and the nightwoke racoons wash their meals

and the children spill out of schools and homes

onto the sidewalks in their every-color boots—

red and cinnamon and daisy—

and when they rocket their bodies into the poolprints

the spray raises up clouds of diamonds

until the whole street sparkles

like sun off endless, overlapping scales

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—

At the Salon, All the Ladies Have Heard About Last Year’s Blueberry Queen

Eighteen, and as beautiful as a mirror

Then, the worst crime, experience—

her downfall, it appears, was being poisoned

by art, overwhelmed

by books, forever quoting the best passages

Now, she claims each of us is here to dive

deeper, to bite the lure

of art, which dangles

one promise: nothing  





Frances Klein (she/her) is an Alaskan poet and teacher. Klein is the author of the poetry collection Another Life (Riot in Your Throat, 2025) and several poetry chapbooks, including (Text) Messages from The Angel Gabriel (Gnashing Teeth Press, 2024). She is a founding editor of Flight: A Literary Sampler, and editor at The Weight Journal. Klein’s writing has appeared in Best Microfictions, The London Magazine, Rattle, The Harvard Advocate, HAD, and others.

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