ISSUE 4
Frances Klein
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Blighted Ovum
an erasure of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible
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bad luck:
the smoke
the mosquitoes
The pitch-dark night the pounding rain
My mind ached like a broken bone
as I struggled to stand in the new place I found myself.
I’d walked my whole life,
and now without warning my body had fallen
a distance where I couldn’t follow
Out of the thunderous rain the
clear voice:
rage
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Brand Strategy
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“Abercrombie…the dog is a golden, and the poodle is not Abercrombie.”
—White Hot, 2022
The brand is Palm Sunday, it is not the crucifixion. The brand is 10% chance of precipitation across the Tri-State area; the brand is not snow in the mountains. Landfills, yes. Conscientiously separating recycling that will be mixed back together on the way to the landfill, no. A leather watch band, not interlocking metal links like the scales on a snake. The brand is a sun lamp pumping vitamin D, not fluorescents. The brand is a paywalled article. It is not a book in the public domain. The reboot, not the original series run. The brand is hydraulic brakes, not disk, not drum. The brand type is Trade Gothic. It is not Arial. The brand is. Is not, not.
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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 serves as assistant editor of Southern Humanities Review.