It is a pleasure and a privilege to share three poems from Wendy Klein’s new pamphlet Having Her Cake, published by Grey Hen Press. The pamphlet is dedicated to Barbara Cox (1943 – 2019). Several poems give us vivid details about their lifelong friendship. However, the focus is Barbara’s ‘physician assisted’ death. The opening poem starts: Barbara never knows what time it is in Britain. California calling ends: the kindly California law / on assisted dying / I tell her I’m coming.

Having her Cake

The chocolate cake, left over
from her annual pre-Christmas do
sits on a large white china plate,
dwindling in size day by day,
an unwashed fork lying next to it,
a temptation to any passers-by,
though no one ever sees
anyone else eating it
and it would have been sacrilege
to open the cutlery drawer,
select a clean fork,
place the used one in the sink
or the dishwasher, but someone
on the third day I’m there removes
the plate, crumb-covered and sticky,
replaces it with a tidy paper version
tucking the now over-large piece
of cling-film around the edges
clumsily, carelessly, as if
it no longer mattered, as if
at any moment it could be binned
plate and all.

What you can’t wake

The dead. No, not even the dogs,
grumbling at being shut
in their crates, beside her bed
peering through the grate, eyes
full of reproach.

No, you can’t wake the dead,
but the not-quite-dead
are too awake, their eyes
peeled until the last,
their flesh jumpy,
their muscles braced.

Beneficiary

Released from the need to worry
for herself, she frets
about the falling stock market
on behalf of her beneficiary,
a willowy young hairdresser,
the daughter she never had,
who will inherit everything:
the rambling shambolic bungalow
with its million and one flaws:
the water pressure that shuts down
the whole system when the shower is on,
necessitating bouts of shouting,
water, water if someone so much as
turns on a tap to rinse a cup,
brushes teeth, flushes the toilet
in any other part of the house —
a second-hand Honda Jazz,
a rusting dishwasher, a dog run
which looks like a concentration camp
for canines, meant to be protection
from ‘critters out there,’
and the stock market falling,
falling, falling.

Biography

Widely published and the winner of many prizes, Wendy Klein is a retired psychotherapist, born in New York and brought up in California. Since leaving the U.S. in 1964, she has lived in Sweden, France, Germany, and England. Her writing has been influenced by early family upheaval resulting from her mother’s death when she was nine months old, her nomadic years as a young single mother and subsequent travel. She has published three collections: Cuba in the Blood (2009) and Anything in Turquoise (2013) from Cinnamon Press, and Mood Indigo (2016), from Oversteps Books., plus a new and selected, Out of the Blue (2019) from The High Window Press. Her first pamphlet Let Battle Commence (2020) from Dempsey & Windle, was based on her great grandfather’s letters home while serving as a Confederate Officer in the US Civil War. She shares her work on https://www.cronepoet.com.