“I Will Not Walk Away”: A Conversation with Jennifer Franklin
Over the late spring and early summer months of 2023, Jennifer Franklin and I corresponded about myth, politics, form, intertextuality, caregiving, much more relating to the craft of poetry and her latest collection of poems, If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023). – Tyler Mills
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As Antigone —
If you think I wasn’t angry
at his betrayal — you’re wrong.
Fury moved through my body
with the gravity of a waterfall.
I cut my ankles under my dress
where no one would see.
I snuck out of my room at 3 a.m.
wearing ripped nightclothes
under my winter coat, not knowing
what I would tell my brother
of this ruin. Once I discovered
home was a lie I told myself,
I shoveled the dirt to bury my life.
The moon watched without judgment —
knowing nothing ever changes
except the clothes men wear while
they wound. Your light, through
the branches, shines like a paper lantern.
Tyler Mills: In If Some God Shakes Your House, the speaker often wears the mask of the Greek mythological figure Antigone — daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta — in poems that place one foot in the mythical story and there other foot in our contemporary world. I keep thinking about the opening lines of one of the “As Antigone” poems: “If you think I wasn’t angry / at his betrayal — you’re wrong. / Fury moved through my body.” In the context of the book, the “he” could be the tyrant, Creon, or even allude to the figure of the stony and cruel ex-husband that appears in other poems. The “he” becomes a mythical and also very real patriarchal tyrant — sometimes even Trump, dare I say his name — in these poems that the Antigone voice reckons with and defies.
My first question is — what first drew you to the myth of Antigone? As you were working on the suite of persona poems that thread throughout the collection, how did you find yourself re-entering the mythical story in ways that you didn’t expect? And at what point, as you were finishing this moving book about the world’s recent political and social upheaval, did you realize that you had completed the final Antigone poem for the book — the poem where this particular voice sings its closing song (“I still want to believe / I can find some way / to fix you.”)?
Jennifer Franklin: I first read Sophocles’ Antigone — alongside Jean Anouilh’s Antigone — in my public school’s AP English class when I was 16-years old. The questions of power, individual conviction, and ultimate sacrifice for one’s beliefs made a lasting impression. Antigone’s courage and conviction have inhabited my imagination for the past 30 years, never losing their allure. My admiration for Antigone was so strong that I always planned to write a series of persona poems about her.
When my daughter was diagnosed with severe autism and epilepsy, and everyone around me — doctors, friends, colleagues, professionals, and even her own father — minimized her struggle and believed I was wasting my life by devoting myself to her therapy and care, I truly understood the magnitude of Antigone’s sacrifice. However, it wasn’t until Trump began his campaign for the presidency and I heard him boasting that he could do whatever he wanted, including committing violence against women, and get away with it, that I knew we were dealing with a cruel tyrant like Creon.
While Trump was running for president, I was in therapy from narcissistic abuse from three people who had been controlling me throughout my life — my mother, my uncle, and my ex-husband. I was learning about all the hallmarks of this kind of manipulation, bullying, and gaslighting. As I became stronger, independent, and impervious to manipulation by these people, I understood from a craft perspective how I could write a book about Antigone and Creon that was both personal and political. When I wrote the last Antigone poem, originally titled “Antigone’s Decision,” I knew that would end the collection. The complexity and nuance of Antigone’s relationship with her disabled daughter feels most fully fleshed out in that poem. The deep and abiding love she has for her — even more than her own life — is evident. But equally apparent is that the 23 years of caretaking that began with the brutal pregnancy has been slowly killing her.
It’s particularly poignant, I think, that this Antigone would have aborted this pregnancy if she had been strong enough to stand up to her mother, her uncle, and her ex-husband — to whom she had been engaged at age 17 — who forced her to have the baby. But once the baby was diagnosed, only the mother and the grandmother loved the baby. And the mother’s love for the daughter means even more since she didn’t want the child. But unlike the politicians and men in Antigone’s life, she is morally driven not to look away from her daughter’s suffering, vulnerability, utter dependence. Poetry can hold these competing emotions. Anne Carson has famously said that poetry is not therapy. I agree. Poetry is better than therapy. It’s always been poetry that has helped me transform the trauma, grief, and suffering of my lived experience into art.
TM: I keep thinking about what you said about persona and poetry’s role in transforming personal trauma into art. As you approached the poems of If Some God Shakes Your House, is there one poem that you felt exemplified this transformation for you — as a poet and as the person behind the poem?
Jennifer Franklin: Some of the poets I admire the most use literary allusions and work with myth in the way that Eliot uses “objective correlative” as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula” for the poet’s emotion so that “when the external facts are given the emotion is at once evoked.” Gregory Orr talks a great deal about transforming personal trauma into art in Poetry as Survival, and in a wonderful interview in Image he says, “The writing of poems, primarily lyric poems, saves poets’ lives all the time — it’s saved my life countless times and the lives of most poets I know. But the reading of poems — that also saves lives. What does Emily Dickinson say? ‘The Province of the Saved / Should be the Art — To save — / Through Skill obtained in Themselves …’ Poets are those who have been saved by poetry, and sometimes their task is to help others survive and regain vitality and discover meaning in existence.” For me, art is all about making meaning from the whole range of our human experiences for other humans to take in. That is one of the reasons I’m not concerned about art made by AI. I’m concerned about AI for other reasons but not as something that is going to put our creativity in jeopardy. I want my poems to be well-crafted in terms of language and style, but ultimately it is the meaning that is most important to me.
I think the Antigone poem that grapples with the nuances of the dual Antigone literary character and my persona for this work is “As Antigone,” beginning with the lines, “I’m all done being nice. / It hasn’t gotten me anywhere.” This poem is the existential heart of the book. The moment that, for me, represents the moment in The Myth of Sisyphus where Camus writes, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” In this poem, Antigone stops living to please other people and realizes that she has been able to endure because of the love for her daughter and for writing. Hope sustains her because she is able to “turn weeds into flowers.” This is the gift of her dual devotion — to her daughter and to her art.
TM: What did your revision process look like for your “As Antigone —” poems? Was there a moment during the revision process that surprised you the most? I find revision to be such a fascinating craft topic, considering how much it can change from poem to poem and book to book. I’m curious, also, about how your revision process might have changed from the poems in your last book, No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018), to your latest.
Jennifer Franklin: The Creon figure in my book is an amalgamation of the ancient Greek tyrant, the malevolent former president, my uncle and my ex-husband. Their cruelty, arrogance, narcissism, and inability for empathy unites them. The “As Antigone” poem that begins with the betrayal went through very little revision because betrayal was the defining moment of my relationship to each of these characters. In the case of Trump, the betrayal is to democracy itself.
The last poem in the book was slightly longer and although it practically wrote itself, I did remove an earlier reference to Nora from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. My mentor at Brown, Arnold Weinstein, taught a popular class called Nordic Legacy where we read all the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg, studied Munch’s paintings, drawings, and woodcuts, and viewed a Bergman film each week. Nora’s ultimate act of defiance of the systemic misogyny of the patriarchy is never far from my mind. My relationship to Nora’s slammed door has always been complex. I both admire her choice and am appalled by it. For me, it was shorthand for the profound decision that a mother makes if she leaves her child, regardless of the circumstances. But I decided that the poem’s essence was being weighed down by that literary allusion. I wanted to spotlight the moment outside the bakery where the mother considers and rejects the possibility of handing the child to the selfish and indifferent father, the surgeon who has not given his child a penny of support since his court ordered responsibility ended when she turned 21 and who has not seen her since 2017.
The poems in my last book, No Small Gift, went through a more extensive revision process. I kept taking a line here or there out of those poems and removing several of the Philomela poems that grappled with my tongue cancer. But most of the editing entailed removing entire poems, including some of the published memento mori poems. I wanted the emotional core of the book to rest with the Antigone poems and by paring back some of the prose poems and sonnets, I think I achieved that goal.
TM: As I read your powerful book, I kept thinking about how many of the poems travel through memory— to Italy, especially — and also how the poems titled with month names are almost windows in time that offer views of stillness and sharp perceptions of the world in stillness. In other words, in the month poems, a speaker is often inside an interior space, reflecting, grieving, and perceiving the microcosm of an individual life with precision and nuance so that we, too, travel back to that time and experience NYC during the intensely interior time of the pandemic lockdown. What was it like for you to write these month poems and shape them into the lyric windows of time that they open into the larger texture of If Some God Shakes Your House? How were you thinking about the prose poem as a form as you were drafting and revising these individual poems? Do you have a favorite month poem in the book? And why?
Jennifer Franklin: Most of the poems in the book were written before the pandemic began. I turned my book in to my editors in the beginning of June 2020 but the reason that there is a mood and tone of isolation throughout all the poems, the feelings that most of us experienced during lockdown, is because I have spent most of the past two decades living in a small apartment with my severely disabled daughter, raising her by myself. Her profound autism and epilepsy prevented me from being able to take her outside into the community for long stretches of time. From 2010-2015, she used to try to wander when I took her out so it was unsafe to leave the apartment alone with her until her epilepsy was under control.
As a single mother, until I met my husband in 2017, there were more times than I can count where strangers on the street and Starbucks’ baristas had to help me walk Anna home or put her in a taxi. Once, she threw herself on the ground as we were walking to a Music for Autism concert at the 92nd Street Y, which was only three crosstown blocks from our apartment. So when the pandemic arrived, I was psychologically and physically prepared for the kind of deprivation lockdown required of us. Before I had a child, I spent time traveling in Ireland, France, Italy, Greece, the UK, and Spain. I often return in memory and in my writing to places I was lucky enough to see before my life became consumed with caretaking.
Writing a series of prose poems was a new endeavor for me. I read a lot of surrealist prose poems when I was an undergraduate at Brown in the early-mid 90s. C.D. Wright was one of my teachers and we read a lot of novels in verse in her class The New Long Poem, so it was a form I had studied but not attempted. When I decided that I wanted to overtly address the political stories of the day, particularly those associated with women’s rights and legal action against bodily autonomy, I wanted a form that could hold the weight of the facts. Each of these prose poems has a month of the year for the title and a quote by a writer or artist, predominantly women, to provide a frame for the headline or news story of that month. Details of my life in NYC and the daily anxieties of taking care of my disabled daughter mingle with the existential anxieties of being alive in this fraught moment of political division, late-stage capitalism, corporate greed, racism, homophobia, misogyny, state-sanctioned police violence, and mass shootings of our nation’s children.
The most important prose poem to me is the one my editors at Four Way Books allowed me to include after the book was already finished and sent to the typesetter. It’s “June 24, 2022,” written after Roe v. Wade was overturned. The sickening fear that Roe was going to be overturned runs through the entire book and it wouldn’t have been complete without that poem. I started thinking about this last poem once the leak was reported. The day Roe was overturned, my husband and I saw The Public Theater’s brilliant adaptation of Richard III in Central Park starring Danai Gurira as the eponymous lead. Even as I was dazzled by the acting and Shakespeare’s language, what struck me most that night — while watching Shakespeare’s indelible villain’s obsession with power and winning the throne — were the similarities with the last president. The way they both manipulated, lied, plotted and turned against anyone who stood in the way or dared to question them. Both are insecure and full of self-loathing masked by narcissistic ego. The only substantive difference is that Trump didn’t use brilliant speeches to conceal his plan to dismantle government and justice. He used clumsy demagoguery that brazenly called the January 6th rioters to storm the Capitol.
As I sat in the outdoor theater during intermission, I drafted part of the poem. “Because I love my daughter more than myself, there are some decisions that still shut every door” was the first line I wrote, and then “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 and a shrine.” I believe that giving birth to a child should be only the decision of the one who is pregnant. Nobody should interfere, influence, or legislate this inalienable right to choose. The number of women I know who have been talked out of abortions by family, by religious figures, by men, is startling. Since I’ve written this book, many more people have shared similar stories with me.
When my mother learned I was planning to write about my hyperemesis and having wanted to get an abortion, she said that it would negate all the love and all the care I’ve given to my daughter over the past 23 years. I told her that I believe it’s the exact opposite. The fact that I didn’t want this child because of extreme suffering I underwent during pregnancy, yet devoted my entire life to her care for the past 23 years, is a level of devotion very few people are capable of sustaining. It’s not natural for a 50-year old woman to sit on the tile floor of a tiny bathroom every night washing a toddler who is trapped in the body of a 22-year-old woman. When my mother was my age, her daughter had a master’s degree and her son was about to graduate from college. While I’ve been saying this, my daughter has been yelling “watch Sesame Street: Funny Food Songs or take a bath?” 57 times.
Abuse of power dynamics and control on both the personal and the political level come together in this poem and represent the struggle and tension of the entire collection. The prose poem that moves me the most because of its tenderness is the first prose poem in the book — “February.” Its trio of equal concerns are politics, disability rights, and climate change. It starts with the wildfires in Australia in February while the pandemic was already raging in China and Italy. It ends with the animals in Goodnight Gorilla being brought back to the zoo. But the poem wants the story to end with all the animals sleeping together free, in the zookeeper’s room. It’s a vision of hope and peace.
TM: Your book braids “Memento Mori” poems into the dynamic that the “As Antigone” and month poems shape with one another. Each kind of poem, as it appears, forms a ribbon that intertwines with the others. The powerful poem “Memento Mori: Doll, 1983” focuses on a kind of rehearsed death, rehearsed violence: “I wasn’t the one who found what the neighborhood boys did / to my Cindy Sue doll, as my brother watched, after they tried / to get me to follow them down the step stairs to our basement.” Would you say something about how art, grief, memory, and/or protest inspired your approach to the “Memento Mori” poems in your book? What was your process like as you composed these poems?
Jennifer Franklin: I’m so glad you brought up the structure of the book. I thought a great deal about the way I wanted the poems to speak to each other and deepen the meanings between the poems. It means a lot to me that you can see what I was doing by braiding the lyric persona poems, in the voice of a contemporary Antigone, the political prose poems that all take place during and right after the Trump Administration, and the memento mori sonnets that speak to each other throughout the collection. I found, while putting together this collection, and have understood even more deeply while choosing poems to read together during my book appearances this past spring, that this book is obsessed not only with the overt themes in it — of personal sacrifice in service of a moral calling, state sanctioned violence and the stripping of bodily autonomy, especially for women and protected classes, the erasure of many especially the sick and disabled population — but also with the more subtle theme about how most people, even those who think of themselves as progressive and empathetic, don’t want to grapple with, discuss, or talk about the taboo and nuanced topics this book holds to the light.
Most people in this country don’t want to see severely disabled people integrated in society, the way there are almost no safeguards from extreme isolation and almost no social services for mothers, including those like me who face raising their disabled child without any help from the father. The sonnets are not only a way for the poems to ask the reader to interrogate their own relationship with memento mori and the myriad of things that each reader may call to mind when thinking of the poignant experiences — art, animals, books, headlines, and relationships — that make them consider their own mortality. But also, the poems allow an opportunity to consider children killed by guns in school, women and girls legally losing their right to choose to have a baby, the brutal police killings of black and brown people, the climate crisis.
The speaker of the memento mori sonnets is overwhelmed by the sheer bombardment of existential dread. But she turns her attention to one thing at a time in hopes that her attention will bring some clarity and hope as well as encourage others to look at the things in their lives as memento mori, to help us live in the present and appreciate beauty amid the suffering. I often thought of two quotations: one by Simone Weil that states, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” And the famous quote from the Talmud that states, “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”
TM: Your work shines a light on the act of caretaking, of mothering, and of the politics of mothering during our post-Roe era. Poems speak about what it means to consider ending a pregnancy and not, and what it means to be a caretaker during moments of extreme difficulty. When you are writing about people in your life, especially a child with disabilities, how do you decide what to include in a poem and what to keep unsaid? Your poems handle this balance so skillfully — truly, I admire this. What are your thoughts about speaking out about difficulty, and also love, and the ways that poetry as an art form can become a vessel for this complex and important dynamic? And what would you like other poets who write about parenting to think about when they are approaching the subject of caretaking in their poems?
Jennifer Franklin: I think these are important questions and my answers might be different if I was writing about a child who could read or understand what my book is about, but my daughter, though she is almost 23, has the cognitive age of an 18-month-old. My greatest wish is that someday she could miraculously understand the complexities and contradictions of my profound love for her, devotion to her, and the enormous sacrifices I have made for her, but I know that is not possible. When Andrew Solomon interviewed me in 2007 for his National Book Critics Circle book, Far From The Tree, about parents who love children very different from themselves, I told him that some people criticized me for the intensive applied behavioral therapy her therapist and I did for 40 hours a week with my daughter for the three years before she began school, and then after school for another two years so she could learn to speak and request simple things. She still cannot tell my husband and I when she feels sick but she has phrases from Sesame Street that she uses to communicate. For example, when she gets her period, she says, “Elmo is red.” When she doesn’t like someone she repeatedly says “bye bye” and then their name over and over until we get the picture.
I am a writer. I was a writer long before I had a child. Writing is both the way I understand the world and the way I grapple with its difficulties. From the time I was 16 and my poetry teacher, Clayton Marsh, at the New Jersey Scholars program, taught us about negative capability, I embraced the idea of writing about things in all their complexity. I often think of Baldwin, “One writes out of one thing only — one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” Although I don’t agree that the only thing one can write about is lived experience, I tend to turn to it often.
For me, the honest reckoning that I have been this devoted and this loving to a child that I didn’t want to have makes my sacrifices more poignant and my experiences with Anna more meaningful. My pregnancy was so brutal that I was convinced my hyperemesis was nature’s way of warning me to get an abortion. Both my mother and my husband talked me out of getting an abortion for different reasons. My husband was trying to control me and my mother thought that I would never be able to forgive myself if I ended the pregnancy and that the abortion would end my marriage. Even though I had two degrees from Ivy League schools and was well read in women’s history, feminist theory, philosophy, and the modernist novel, I wasn’t able to put the theory I had learned into practice. I wrote two other books before I was ready to tackle these topics. It was the repeal of Roe v. Wade and the fact that our mothers had more bodily autonomy than our daughters do in our country at this time that propelled me to wrestle with these complex themes. It takes a thick skin and a lot of bravery to write about people you love and show them as the complex people they are.
Throughout my life, there are few people I have loved more and been influenced by more than my mother, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t express the problems that have emerged from this relationship. Jenny Xie recently said at a reading that her parents know her better than her poems do, which I thought was a profound way of saying that the personal relationships do not need to be ruined because one writes about painful aspects of those relationships. The novelist and memoirist Anne Lamott writes, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” I know everyone has different philosophies about this and I think each writer needs to navigate these waters themselves. A poet I deeply admire wrote a book about his late child that his ex-wife didn’t want him to write but he needed to write it in order to grieve. Yet, this same poet gave one of my students the advice to wait until her parents were dead to publish the poems she wrote about them in her MFA program. He sensed that she didn’t have the stomach for the possible ramifications. I think it all comes down to what you are willing to do for your art. For the sake of the poem. To make it as honest and true to your vision as possible. To quote Sylvia Plath, “everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it.” The more I read publicly from this book and receive letters from readers, the more I realize the ways that my experience might help other parents who are struggling because of their child’s profound autism.
TM: What are you working on now? Have you continued any of the themes of If Some God Shakes Your House in your new work or are you writing something in a completely different vein? As a poet, how do you find yourself adjusting from book to book, from one node of inquiry to another as poems unspool and emerge from different contexts of thought, research, and/or experience?
Jennifer Franklin: I’m working on a new manuscript, but I plan to take time with it and see how it evolves organically. As I mentioned, If Some God was finished in the middle of 2020 in a hothouse environment of the pandemic. I began writing poems for a new manuscript in May of 2022 when I was away for a residency in Cape Cod that was supported by a grant from the Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. The title of my new collection, A Fire in Her Brain, comes from James Joyce, writing about his daughter Lucia Anna Joyce: “Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia, and it has kindled a fire in her brain.” I plan to use the story of James and Lucia as both foil and analog to my own experience with my daughter, Anna Livia — whom I named after Anna Livia Plurabelle, the personification of Dublin’s River Liffey in Finnegans Wake. A Fire in Her Brain grapples with the cultural and always shifting notions of mental health disorders — the phrase “a fire in the brain” itself can connote both the spark of genius and a mind in conflagration — as well as the philosophical and ethical questions concerning the demands of caretaking in a capitalistic society, the individual versus the State, the pernicious friction between doctor and patient, women against the patriarchy, and the rights of the mentally ill.
I’m writing four kinds of poems for this collection — those about my daughter, those about Lucia Joyce, those about my grandmother and her sisters growing up as Sicilian immigrants in the Bronx in the 1920s, one of whom died of brain cancer at 26, and a last group about women from art, literature, and myth who have been labeled “mad,” particularly the figure of Cassandra, whose prophetic abilities were both a gift and a curse — recalling the multiple valences of “a fire in the brain.” These will be interspersed with hybrid texts informed by archival research. When I was an undergraduate at Brown, I received a grant to research the letters of Joyce in Dublin. I am hoping to continue that research where I left it, 30 years on. Lucia Joyce has settled into my psyche all the while, and my compassion for and interest in her has only intensified with the diagnosis, 20 years ago, of Anna Livia. This project is inspired by the unstated and unarticulated lives led by countless women who are silenced for a variety of different reasons. Some of the new poems have already been accepted for publication, including one by Diane Seuss for poem-a-day in March 2023.
The poems about Anna Livia and Lucia Anna will form the center of the project, including a long poem that was just published in Blackbird that describes their eerily similar experiences. This poem is an attempt to pay homage to their lives, both lives that are essentially discounted and erased. I hope these poems encourage the reader to challenge preconceptions of mental and neurological disorders and help the reader to consider the subjects, and by extension, all disabled and mentally ill people, from a more compassionate perspective. The work I’ve already written emphasizes that in the 100 years between the birth of Lucia and Anna Livia, the lives of the neurodiverse people have not improved very much. In our own dystopian time, our daughters and granddaughters have fewer rights than our mothers and grandmothers did, and people with mental and neurological illness continue to make society uncomfortable. The overwhelming desire is for them to be shut away, out of sight, out of mind — silenced and invisible. After writing If Some God Shakes Your House, I realize that I still feel called to include disability awareness and advocacy as part of my creative projects.
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Selections from If Some God Shakes Your House
As Antigone —
I’m all done being nice.
It hasn’t gotten me anywhere.
Since I was young, I gave
everything away — milk
money, homework, adoration.
Everyone wanted to make me
into a small version of herself —
teaching me weaving, writing,
wiles. All I wanted was love —
picked a bouquet of dandelions
and handed it to my mother.
When she turned her mouth
into a little o and called the tight
yellow suns weeds, my body
became a weight I wanted
to let go. I thought of all
the lessons I memorized
to keep me still, the colors
I couldn’t wear because
they clashed with my red hair,
all the rules of modesty
so men would not look at me
with hunger. The only thing
I owned was a jaw I was given,
like Pandora, as a girl. Before I
unlatched the lid, I had already lost
everything—faith, health,
my child. I refused to watch
what flew out. But something
hard as lapis, real as want,
wrenched my wrist right back
so hope remained, writhing
alone at the bottom of the jar
like dirty water after dead
tulips are discarded—
yellow stamens dropping
pollen to the floor. Silent,
it watched me for years.
Months at a time, I forgot
it was there. But when it’s
trapped like that, it grows
so large, nothing can quell it.
No one thanks me for what
I have done. But I don’t need
Praise anymore. I turned
Weeds into flowers.
/ / /
Memento Mori: Doll, 1983
I wasn’t the one who found what the neighborhood boys did to my Cindy Sue doll, as my brother watched, after they tried to get me to follow them down the steep stairs to our basement. I knew from their faces they weren’t going down there to play board games — stacked on the shelves my father built when he wasn’t in the office — or even the Nintendo, hooked up to the old TV. I stayed upstairs finishing homework but heard the boys laughing. My mother found the five-foot doll — naked and face down.
Jagged cuts of bright red marker slashed her where her underwear should have been. I was too young to understand what they were trying to do to this plastic version of girls they knew. When my mother told my hot-faced brother those boys could not come back, fear found me like the basement’s musty smell that always stayed on our clothes even after we walked upstairs and shut the door.
/ / /
June 24, 2022
That alabaster hospital room — for twenty-two years, I have tried to crawl my way out. Its antiseptic smells and white walls still taunt me as I read today’s headlines and think of all the women and girls now stripped by the state of their right to choose. I begged them — first my mother, then my husband. Then together. I cried, hair matted and dirty from vomiting for twenty-three days. Seven weeks pregnant, I pleaded with them not to force me to have the baby. As if my body already knew how sick she was and how the architecture of my life would be destroyed. Instead of helping me, my husband ordered a psych 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.
Nothing is enough. I offer to help women travel here and bring them to clinics, write postcards to swing states — my body a sanctuary and a shrine. Because I love my daughter more than myself, there are some decisions I can never come back from. Dickinson wrote, “To attempt to speak of what has been, would be impossible. Abyss has no Biographer —” 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.
/ / /
As Antigone —
I still want to believe
I can find some way
to fix you. That if I go
back to the beginning —
retrace the disaster
with the savant detective’s
obsession, I could uncover
a cure — the smartest
expert, some successful drug.
Better yet, I want
the pediatrician
to give you a different diagnosis.
I want to go back
to the walk home
past restaurants and playgrounds,
autumnal light catching
all the auburn
in your hair. I want to go back
to the moment
your father left us
outside the café, consider
handing you to him —
all forty-seven pounds
of you in your gingham pants
and hot pink cardigan —
Dalmatians decorating
the little pockets — and walk away
without looking back.
But I would never have left
and I won’t now. One way
or another, you will
be the end of me —
inadvertent brute force,
vector of virus, constant
caretaking, your heavy
body forcing my remission’s
abrupt end. I know
what’s waiting —
as certain as cloth hung to hold
my scarred neck.
I will not walk away.
The moment the nurse
pressed your splotched
body into my arms,
your needs fixed my fate.
Constantly confused,
your jagged voice
requests Christmas songs
all spring. You shove
words of grace
into my dry throat
and I sing. I don’t need
a bottle of pills,
white as sleep, to silence me.
Every ersatz saint knows
endless sacrifice
is suicide. For twenty years,
I have been disappearing.
Touch me;
I am not even here.
/ / / / /
To obtain a copy of If Some God Shakes Your House from Four Way Books, click here …
Thanks for this terrific interview!