You knew it never goes away—shame from childhood. The fear of the face behind you in the dining room mirror. The man who handed me history books to harden my mind but instead made me too feeling. I, too, was frozen in bed, petrified by the severe woman in black, her raven hair pulled in a tight bun, her disapproving stare. The letters and promises, lights shut tight to hide the truth, threats writ large below my window. The wine poured in my childhood glass as I ate pounded chicken in a wood-paneled room beside a cathedral. Thinking of the angels gilded wings so I would not have to see his false face. The pretty things he said to make me feel important. The walls and walls of paintings he set before my hungry eyes.
*
VIRGINIA WOOLF KNOWS THE KEY TO LIFE BUT IS NOT ALLOWED TO USE IT
Most of the year had been filled with doctor’s appointments. It did not count as leaving the house if the destination was always another room where you were constantly reminded how ill you were and that life is endlessly on pause until you are healthy again. How can one become healthy if one is prevented from walking, from moving, from being part of the chaos and chatter of the city and its citizens, knowing their purpose, owning their various destinations, crisscrossing the city and the river with the determination of birds of prey, ready to descend at a moment’s notice? The unhealthy are always excluded from the orchestra of daily life. How unbearable to stand inside, listening to the swell of music as it drifted across the Thames to her open window.
*
TO VIRGINIA WOOLF AS WE WATCH THE CHILDREN—
nieces and nephews— run the grounds, chase rabbits, make crafts. The beautiful sound grates our ears. Why can’t they see suffering? How can they still think the small self is the primary subject? They trample grass as if it doesn’t feel the abuse. Horrific—their twisted movement and squeals rise into the clouds. Outside they still want to scrape my insides with their little shovels. You were kinder than I am. You wrote light verse for Vanessa’s children. I am inviolate, in this burning garden, the flowers share my fear of their unholy voices.
*
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.
