Between the Devil and the Clear Blue Sky
In the Tongass we had ten months a year
of the good stuff. At times it came even
from an empty sky, the perspiration
needling earthward from some source beyond
perception. A rain different entirely
from the usual storm clouds that would stoop,
blackberry heavy, to lick the walls of
the Inside Passage. The kids who lived out
at Mud Bight, in the shanty-houses built
on pilings, used to say about that rain
that it was the devil beating his wife,
the sound of it some precipitous thing
we didn’t yet know, standing then on the
cliff of childhood before we dove over.
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/
