Clocks will still mark time. Only speeches
by the president under siege will sound true. Bombed
cities that refuse to fall will be decimated. Spring will stall
as if waiting for war to end before it can arrive.
Monuments will stand, protected by sandbags,
as children cry. Soldiers will kill volunteers
bringing food to abandoned dogs and take
hostages in apartment buildings. Journalists will be shot
in the neck. Violins will play in small boxes as women fill
vases of flowers at their broken windows.
No one will speak about what happens to women
after they are captured. Nobody will escape
from the fate they know will find them.
At the end of the world, mirrors will be obsolete.
Jennifer Franklin
Jennifer is the author of three full-length collections including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023) and No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018). Franklin is the recipient of a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant for poetry and a 2021 CRCF Literature Award. Her work has been published in American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Beloit, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, JAMA, The Nation, New England Review, the Paris Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Society’s Poetry in Motion, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, and Valparaiso Review, among other places. She teaches in Manhattanville's MFA program and the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where serves as Program Director. She lives in New York City.