Widower
My unborn son, I must teach you to die just as I have been taught. I must teach you Death’s lines, the shades and hues it carries, how it stretches on walls, a contortionist of pastels. My death with your mother was a fever, our conjoined hearts always bleeding. She knew of dying, caught it on the reflection of canvas. Stone belonged to me. This earth was hers. I buried your mother in a mural her toes the olivine of a forest, a revolution of rose under her back, the long, black crow over her eyes, its plume widespread. It was then that I knew I was ending. La Catrina sings herself a skin tonight. Long dresses hide her feet. She will ask me to dance and I will succumb again. I am a man. I control nothing in this world. Ready the emerald tie for my neck. My son, I trade air for thorns. Jordan E. Franklin Jordan E. Franklin is a poet from Brooklyn, NY. An alum of Brooklyn College, she recently earned her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton where she served as a Turner Fellow. Her work has appeared in the Southampton Review, Suffragette City Zine, Breadcrumbs, easy paradise and acorn & iris. In 2017, her work “Black Boy” was selected by Major Jackson as the winning poem of the James Hearst Poetry Prize hosted by the North American Review.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
The Ekphrastic Review
COOKIES/PRIVACY
This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesJoin us: Facebook and Bluesky
July 2025
|