Break: poet and her friend share (a joint, a bench)

For Kay

and the park, once endarkened, gleams
and all the grass lets out a choral breath
and all the streetlamps bleed amber
like honey
and the smoke burns through the anxiety
in the poet’s chest
and the projector upstairs breaks before
she can hit the ground
and all the canaries with their gas masks
perch warm in her lungs
and school was weeks away
and home was hours away
and her body obeys
and her arms can fit around her
and her grin rose green again
on the third puff
as if painted with re-agent
and all the cats and dogs broke
the dark towards her
and she’s Snow White’s song —
glowing epicenter of life,
Demeter with Persephone
in her arms, sprouts seasoned
between two kindling fingers
and Morrissey was wrong—the light
goes out
and her friend ignites it, passing it again
and the heat’s a baptism
and this is what her mother told her
prayer was—the words over-
flowing the mouth

and the being held.

poet’s day: “The Night Eats the World”

After Derek Ellis

There are no miracles here. I can’t take back
all I put inside this earth. I climb the walls
to watch the white break, hoping my father
hasn’t lied again—that he stays where he fell
into the dirt. Now I know he isn’t the rain.
The lightning in the distance is neither
his tongue nor God’s ready to scold me
for my doubt. Out here, neither the pen nor
the bullet withdraws. There are no more self-
edits. No more pills. No cross outs, the land
before me empty and blank as a page. Beyond
it all, meaning writhes free of its straps.
In this hungry, unbroken Night, I am alone
again. I lift my pen. Finally, I mean what I say.

Jordan E. Franklin hails from Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton and a PhD from Binghamton University. She is the author of the poetry collection, when the signals come home (Switchback Books), and the chapbook, boys in the electric age (Tolsun Books). Her work has appeared in Breadcrumbs, Frontier, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, the Southampton Review, Torch Literary Arts, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2017 James Hearst Poetry Prize, the 2020 Gatewood Prize, and the 2024 AWP Intro Journals Project Award.