If Some God Shakes Your House by Jennifer Franklin

What a book! The poems in Jennifer Franklin’s If Some God Shakes Your House hit hard with an emotional clarity void of pathos or melodrama. Personal history is blended with ancient Greek mythology, Middle Ages heroes, and moments of death (Momento Mori). Antigone is a recurrent figure and gives a lens through which to process the speaker’s recounting of a wretched and controlling first marriage, life as a caregiver to a disabled child/adult, personal illness, traumatic birth, and a current calmness/acceptance/peacefulness that allows the reader to process the horrific from a place of safety. Franklin’s skills and honesty are astounding and impactful. Marvelous collection! Buy here.

From “Momento Mori: Stradivarius”

In a few decades, they will go to sleep. Even

The greatest instruments must die; their wounded

wood will no longer make the same sounds they’ve made

for three centuries. The mayor of Cremona shuts the town,

blocks the cobblestone streets for five weeks so musicians

can record thousands of scales and arpeggios in quiet.

Each car remains parked and silenced; all the buzzing

lightbulbs in the concert hall stand unscrewed . . .

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 daugher crumbles like a rag doll when she seizes—her heavy body limp in my arms. I watch us from above, our forced and permanent Pietá. Can you see the truth? The child isn’t the one who is dead.