Jennifer Franklin
Antigone Realizes Why She Loves the Dead
The only ones who cannot betray me,
I can talk to them without judgment.
They have said every cruel thing
they will utter, stolen everything they will take.
Finished fighting their flawed battles,
they are as tired as I am, crumpled in the corner
of my bed—hiding my eyes under a silver sheet.
They are quiet; their closed mouths
stitched shut like the dolls I wanted
to smash against my bureau after my mother
lined them up around my room. I recite lines
to them when no one listens to prove I am not alone.
Sometimes, I hear them echo the same words back
while the moon watches with its rough, cold face.
—Submitted on 04/10/2020
Jennifer Franklin is the author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018) and Looming (Elixir Press, 2015). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Boston Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism (New York Quarterly Books, 2019), edited by Sean Thomas Dougherty. Living in New York City, Franklin teaches in the MFA program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, NY, and serves as program director at the Hudson Valley Writers Center.
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