E—
A cento of the Derek Jarman film Blue
Once there are only two of us you set to work mapping the solemn geography of human limits. You are slow and deliberate, a dedicated cartographer.
***
The empty book of a new year opens.
I am the marble, you the sculptor. Your tool is a refined meanness, carving away anything in me that does not reflect you.
***
Another year passes.
It’s not so bad, this melting of self. This slow drip, minute by minute, into the river of hours that leads to your sea.
I submerge in you and come up half dissolved.
***
Each day is a room where I sit waiting to hear what parts of me have been lost in the night. I clasp my hands before me. When I part them, they disappear.
If I lose half myself, will my self be halved?
***
Your frustration: after all this time, you have not found the core of me. You describe it: a naked light bulb in a dark and ruined room.
You try to enter me like a virus, but I am out of your reach. I am walking behind the sky.
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. Readers can find more of her work at kleinpoetryblog.wordpress.com.
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Heavy Feather Review 