Jennifer Franklin
Three Poems
November
We look like we have aged nine years over the last four. Our dog and our daughter pace the living room, as if they know what hangs in the balance. I slice the apple and cut myself—watch the blood soak into the wooden cutting board as if it were not my own. The days are getting shorter. It is almost a hundred years since Celan was born and fifty since he drowned himself in the Seine, unused Waiting for Godot tickets in his wallet at home. Bill Irwin performs Beckett in a bowler hat and baggy pants—part clown, part clairvoyant. Clean said “Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.” It doesn’t diminish his words that he chose to stop speaking.
We go to sleep and wake up four times. Still the election has not been called. We find out the news the way our ancestors did in times of plague. Bells ring out in the streets and when we emerge from the cloying rooms, stale with old air, early autumn meets us like longed-for draft. We walk five miles. The dog drags behind us. We talk to strangers; again, the city is our home. Since Celan, after all he saw, could write A star still has its light. Nothing, nothing is lost, I will believe him. We enter the building through the side door and see nobody. I wash and peel the ripe pears.
Memento Mori: New Year’s Eve
The thriller almost doesn’t end in time
to turn our rote attention to the lit
crystal ball in a mostly empty Times
Square. Masked essential workers dance, distanced,
awkward in feigned festivity. Billboards
and neon flash ads for ridiculous
goods to empty streets. Dystopian
and dismal, inflated purple and gold
figures bend to the god of fitness they
promote. “Wonderful World” runs late; the mayor
misses his cue. In the distance, fire-
works sound and scare the dog. You kiss me
after midnight. Then you check the news
for the latest tally of daily deaths.
October
Even though we have done nothing wrong, when we cross state lines, we feel guilty. Being inside an apartment for six months straight makes me dangerous. The light interrogates us as we drive north out of the city, to the cape. The ducks and heron greet us with their calls, monitoring the inlet all night as we lie awake glad to be tucked into strange thin sheets. The dog sits by my feet and watches water fowl walk back and forth on the dock, next to a tree that’s the closest to a cypress that can grow in New England. I put my phone in the drawer so the news cannot claim me. Still, I hear the tyrant is in the hospital and as soon as he’s released, he makes his men drive him through the streets though he’s still contagious. The woman who wants to repeal Roe vs. Wade will be confirmed before the election. It all comes through as static, as indistinct as my friend in Trinidad reading his poems from his aqua room.
Here, I wake early, sit on the small deck with a mug of strong coffee, read the new novel by the writer with whom I rode the train in January. I don’t care if she has used part of my sad story to help make a case for euthanasia. That was my old life and I leave it here in the damp marshlands where the ducks skim the water in jagged rows. I watch light lace the trees. “The meaning of life is that it ends,” Kafka wrote. When we go home, you bring me coffee in the mug smothered by Warhol’s outlandish poppies—purple, red, purple.
—Submitted on
Jennifer Franklin is the author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018) and Looming (Elixer Press, 2015). If Some God Shakes Your House is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2023. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, JAMA, Los Angeles Review, Paris Review, and other journals. Franklin teaches at Manhattanville College and the Hudson Valley Writers Center, and she is a co-editor at Slapering Hol Press. Franklin lives in New York City. Online at jenniferfranklinpoet.com.
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