Jennifer Franklin

THE GIRL WHO HAD NEVER BEEN BORN

In the used bookstore, I find a volume
of conversations with Beckett who insists
when he met Lucia, she was already
mentally disturbed. That everyone saw it
except Joyce who refused to give up on her talent.
But Beckett admits he never saw her in her
crazy states. Still, he maintained Jung had her
in mind when wrote about the girl who had never been born. 

Anna Livia rouses herself­­—sheets and comforters
rustle against her legs. Soon, I will enter the room
and dress her so she can spend the day as she
has spent each day for the past twenty-three years,
watching puppets sing songs on a small screen.
Soon, I will lie down with her.

JENNIFER FRANKLIN is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way, 2023), finalist for the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize and the 2023 Julie Suk Award. She has received a Pushcart Prize, a NYFA/City Artist Corps grant, and a Café Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. Poems from her new manuscript, A Fire in Her Brain, appear in American Poetry Review, The Common, Poetry Northwest, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. With Nicole Callihan and Pichchenda Bao, she coedited the anthology Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, 2024). She teaches in the Manhattanville College MFA Program, for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she serves as program director.