By: Frances Klein
Horoscopes for the New Year
I
Today everything is hypothetical.
It’s best not to leave the bed.
Spend all day running simulations.
The best comebacks, comeups, and victories are in your mind.
II
Today, watch out for snakes.
Plummeting temperatures push cold-blooded reptiles indoors.
They insinuate themselves, lowering the heat on your self esteem.
III
Today you will meet an old friend in disguise.
It may call itself a cleanse, but a diet with any other name is still a diet.
IV
Take time today to appreciate the small ones who are getting you through.
Croon to an artichoke.
Pet a scented candle.
Ladle love over the hot water heater that fills your bath.
Don’t leave anything out.
V
Today, change all your clocks by twenty minutes.
Live in your own time zone.
Late and early are myths, there are no alarm clocks.
Sleepwalk into the New Year while the rest of the world runs.
Meditations on Beginnings and Endings: a Palindrome
I
The end has come—
and everything curls in on itself like a new fiddlehead fern.
All day, every hour, the clock strikes twelve—
a nautilus shell spirals both inward and outward.
Beginnings are born from the seed of each end—
II
I welcome the new year with weeping—
my standard greeting:
Each fat tear is a perfect sphere, a whole world—
everything I would say clicks in my throat like a car turning over.
I stall in cold weather—
III
Sourdough starters are the end of one life giving thing—
nourishment to the next.
If only life were limited to just the things that give life—
full to the bursting,
This world would be testing the integrity of its seams—
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/.