Falling Apart, by George Franklin

The Basket of Apples, by Paul Cezanne (France). 1894.

Falling Apart

On my table tonight in a bowl, apples and pears,
Balanced against each other, stem to glossy skin.
If they are joined at all, it’s an intricate architecture,
Forces at rest.  It makes me think of Cezanne
And his basket of apples spilling out onto the table,
The wine bottle leaning like the Tower of Pisa in
Miniature, folds of the towel forming ski slopes
For apples, the disjointed table, and toasted
Biscuits stacked crossways on the white plate--
The world seems to be falling apart, held together
Only for a moment by the frame of the painting.
It is Poussin’s  L’Enlèvement des Sabines enacted
By a basket of apples, by biscuits and a white plate,
And underneath the plate, barely noticed, lies a
Notebook, level, undisturbed.

George Franklin

George Franklin's most recent collection, Traveling for No Good Reason, won the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions competition and was published in 2018. A bilingual collection, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas, translated by Ximena Gomez was also published in 2018 by Katakana Editores, and individual poems have appeared in various journals, including The Threepenny Review, Salamander, Pedestal Magazine, Typishly, and Cagibi. A broadside from Broadsided Press is forthcoming in 2019, along with new poems in Into the Void and a feature in Cagibi.  He also practices law in Miami and teaches poetry workshops in Florida state prisons.

The Abduction of the Sabine Women, by Nicolas Poussin (France). 1638.