A Partial List of Things I Can’t Control

 

 

 

The rain, which is inconsolable.

 

The day the morays go out to sea.

 

The lives of fish in February.

 

Carpenter bees who think it’s Spring.

 

Contempt with a side of sugar.

 

The swimming pool: when it opens, when the baby without a diaper—

 

Magnets.

 

When octopi throw shells (it’s true, they rage in the Bay).

 

When birds are premonitions.

 

Your perception of time.

 

The allure of claws retracting into the softest fur.

 

The kind of love that kills, that finds its pleasure in the stab, the kindling, the wrapped

heads of cabbages.

 

What held my attention yesterday.

 

What I find repellent.

 

My love for a shell.

 

When I’ll feel for you what you feel for me.

 

My cloak of invisibility.

 

Dry skin seeking rain.

 

The failure of cover crops, of a nightgown, on or off, to regulate heat.

 

A holding pattern.

 

 

 

Jill Klein holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a BA from Stanford University. In between came years of stay-at-home parenting and a career in corporate banking. She has poems published in Bellingham Review, Borderlands, Cold Mountain Review, Rattle, The Fourth River, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. Jill lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her engineering husband.