Four poems by Jennifer Franklin
Jennifer Franklin is the author of three full-length collections including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023) and No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018). Franklin is the recipient of a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant for poetry and a 2021 CRCF Literature Award. Her work has been published in American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Beloit, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, JAMA, The Nation, New England Review, the Paris Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Society’s Poetry in Motion, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, and Valparaiso Review, among other places. She teaches in Manhattanville's MFA program and the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where serves as Program Director. She lives in New York City. For more about Franklin’s poetry visit jenniferfranklinpoet.com.
June 24, 2022
That hospital room—for two decades, I have tried to crawl my way out. Its off-white walls and antiseptic smells still torment me. I read today’s headlines and think of all the women and girls now stripped by the state of their right to choose. Twenty-two winters ago, I begged them—first my mother, then my husband. Then together. I cried, hair matted and dirty from vomiting for three weeks. I pleaded with them not to force me to have the baby. As if my body already knew, at seven weeks pregnant, how sick she was and how the architecture of my life would be destroyed. Instead of helping me, my husband ordered a psychiatric consult. He was a doctor so he convinced the attending that I was hysterical and didn’t know my own mind. Anyone with a mind knows this has always been about control.
Because I love my daughter more than myself, there are some decisions that still shut every door. Dickinson wrote, “To attempt to speak of what has been, would be impossible. Abyss has no Biographer—” Nothing is enough. I volunteer to accompany women to clinics, send money to local abortion funds, write postcards to swing states—my body still a sanctuary, a spring, and a shrine. My daughter crumbles like a rag doll when she seizes, her heavy body limp in my arms. I watch us from above, our forced and permanent Pietà. Can you see the truth? The child isn’t the one who is dead.
Memento Mori: Colony Collapse
I used to think Dickinson covered everything
about bees but now they’re disappearing. More
alarming news competes for my attention
but my mother won’t let me forget the bees.
Her garden is almost empty of them. I learn about
their plight—abandoned queens, pesticides, parasites,
pathogens. Even her I cannot coax
more than two small bees around their buttery blooms.
Worried, she warns—nothing will survive without them.
I read the headlines—lists of man-made horrors
I cannot itemize. Funeral after funeral of those who,
struggling to breathe, called out for their mothers.
I think of the insects in Dutch still lifes. The bees lie
upturned on the table, their five eyes, all closed.
Nothing Can Cure Her
The woman stands at the high windows.
She is waiting for something. She stands
each day—looking out into the city.
If you don’t know her, you don’t know
why she is there, interrogating the tall window.
She stands perfectly still—head tilted
to the side. She hears music in the distance.
She has stood like this for two decades, waiting.
It is useless to speak to her. To try to convince her
to stop waiting or follow you away from the glass.
She is a mother so her heart is stitched to sorrow.
She waits for her child to return home from school
on the short yellow bus reserved for sick children.
She waits like Demeter waited for Persephone.
Always, she imagines something may have transpired
to finally heal her. Always, she is disappointed.
The child who left in the morning is the same child
who returns at dusk; nothing can cure her.
Never has a mother’s love saved her child—
from disease, from rape, from guns.
The woman has lost her youth in front of this window.
She has lost her first husband, most of her friends.
She loves the sick child more than any of them.
She even loves her grief more than she loved them.
Her grief reminds her what needs to be done.
The child cannot speak but she even loves
her daughter’s silence. The woman who loves
words more than her own life.
She is a mother. A mother is always doomed
to love most what she cannot have.