THE VOICE
A woman like me should not have children.
Surrounded by books, oblivious to seasons.
Sitting with the dog, reading. A woman
like me doesn’t know how to live
in the present. When I got pregnant,
it was the first time I understood
I had a body but not how it could be
turned against me. Just because I
speak to my dog in a lilting voice
doesn’t mean I am maternal.
It means I prefer the simplicity of animals.
A woman like me should not have children.
Hour after hour, I arrange fragments of truth—
words on paper that cannot love me back.
*
BROKEN & UNALIVE
How horrible the sound, and how loud,
as the doe searches the woods for her felled fawn
who thrashes below us as if she can outrun
death. How alone each of us is in that moment—
the bereft doe, retreating up the mountain,
the dog smelling the deck, as the fawn flails
below her. You, waiting until she is still to drag
her stiff body up the mountain, away from the house.
And most alone—our daughter, singing to herself,
spinning through the cabin—locked in her damaged
mind. And me, watching. Always watching—
waiting for more terrible news. If it were just
the beautiful body of the fawn that was broken
and unalive, why are our limbs suddenly so cold?
*
PARABLE OF THE SICK CHILD BY THE WATER
My life with you these two decades
has been like sitting in the corner
of this deck on the salt marsh,
watching the inlet and seeing,
from time to time, without
warning, two swans flying
low over the water—
flapping their wings,
sounding their loud cry
into the afternoon. Communion
without words—something
between them—one always
ahead of the other. The same way
you lead, showing me how to follow.
*
PARABLE OF THE SICK CHILD IN THE CITY
The apartment is never quiet. Construction
workers bang on the parapets, endlessly.
My daughter’s therapist repeats simple
directions as my daughter, dazed, scripts
and smiles, moves her awkward body
back and forth through the four rooms.
I am never alone with the dog—no time
to know my own thoughts until everyone
finally falls into fitful sleep. All around me,
people plan as if there were a future to walk into.
I believed that too, once. All morning,
my daughter burns as she struggles to brush
her teeth and hair. Sometimes, I can’t look
at her—her face radiates too much light.
*
Jennifer Franklin is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023), finalist for the Paterson Prize in Poetry and finalist for the Julie Suk Award. Poems from her manuscript in progress, A FIRE IN HER BRAIN, have been published in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Common, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Poetry Northwest, and the Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology. Her work has been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, published in The Bedford Guide to Literature (Macmillan, 2024), The Paris Review, The Nation, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Poetry Society of America’s Poetry in Motion. She is the recipient of a 2024 Pushcart Prize, the 2024 Jon Tribble Editing Fellowship from Poetry by the Sea, a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant for poetry, and a 2021 Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. She is Poetry Reviews coeditor of The Rumpus and coeditor, with Nicole Callihan & Pichchenda Bao, of the anthology Braving The Body (Harbor Editions, 2024). Jennifer teaches in the Manhattanville MFA Program, 24Pearl Street/Provincetown Fine Arts Center, and has been teaching manuscript revision workshops for over a decade.