Origin Stories by Frances Klein
Being alive on this planet
means acknowledging that all things
were once something else.
That sponge absorbing water on the bar
was once some spruce, some larch,
some hemlock pulped and compressed
and painted Warning Orange
to stand out on the supermarket shelf.
Each pane of glass dividing
loved one from longed for one--
whether high risk or long sentence--
is a composite product.
Countless grains of sand
married ancient limestone and ash
at high heat, modifying at the molecular level
to birth the see-through sheen we expect.
Before you woke up and went to sleep
and filled the hours in between
with emails and haircuts and five dollar coffees,
you were an egg sleeping in your follicle.
Before you were an egg sleeping in your follicle,
you were the factors pushing your parents to collide:
Prince baby-talking his way through “Kiss,”
the smell of the bonfire, that hot summer night
with three bright stars in the sky.
You were fortune and pheromones
and those three stars aligning.
Or you were patience and planning,
nurses and procedures
and needle upon needle upon needle
compelling you into being.
Even the words we spend
with no thought for the cost
were once something else.
Each casual goodbye the fruit of a phrase,
god be with ye,
tree pruned and grafted
into the least committal of all departures.
A weakened branch unable to bear
the weight of its meaning.
Sponge mopping up the farewell
between mouth and teeth.
Father and son palm to palm,
pressing one more layer
of heat into the glass.
Your parent started saying goodbye to you
the moment you sparked,
each conscientious vitamin,
each placental pump of blood,
each heave of nausea
peaking in a slight wave, a turned back,
a receding into the distance.
Frances Klein is a high school English teacher. She was born and raised in Southeast Alaska, and taught in Bolivia and California before settling in Indianapolis with her husband and son. She has been published in So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Vonnegut Memorial Library and Tupelo Press, among others. Readers can find more of her work at https://kleinpoetryblog.wordpress.com/