Find the River

After Talking Heads

1.

Back in the day when civil rights was in vogue, Bedford-Stuyvesant-boy, back when it was do or die, a river of silver roamed in my father’s mouth, dragged and sharpened over whetstone recruitment at the chime of eighteen. A man in Nicaragua far from home: serrated and leaking from butchered astronomy and Bed-Stuy, always Bed-Stuy that eats its young like the East New Yorks and the Brownsvilles (lies we startle trust-funders and yuppies with, but still they stay, and things change). My father, right-handed but always trading steel with the left, ambidextrous knuckles quicker than the drop of bass, the eighties left him without a unit, a knife, and the melted river swaying to life between his lips.

2.

My mother trapped hummingbirds in her stomach, which fluttered when she laughed. Brooklyn-girl, single-mothered, house full of uncles, aunts, and cousins who chased a whiff of the American Dream in war-ill Korea. House full of Spanish, English, a village, a village, my mother heavy with love and a cutout where her old man should be. Had my older brother at twenty-three, beautiful and screaming so many promises, the night black and simmering with stars ready to open their kitchen windows and shout librettos. Mom, college-fresh, a taxing government woman.

3.

Brooklyn Hospital in the nineties, my parents and brother waiting as I’m cut from Mom, all Lorca-green and a month late into new, weary space. The story of my name fell from her lips then Jesus swaddled in a river’s mouth, descending as John the Baptist watched. 

 ξ

Jordan E. Franklin is a Black poet from Brooklyn, NY. An alumna of Brooklyn College, she earned her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton where she served as a Turner Fellow. Her work has appeared in the Southampton Review, Breadcrumbs, easy paradise, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Frontier, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2017 James Hearst Poetry Prize offered by the North American Review and a finalist of both the 2018 Nightjar Review Poetry Contest and the 2019 Furious Flower Poetry Prize. Her first poetry collection, when the signals come home, was selected as the winner of the 2020 Gatewood Prize and will be published by Switchback Books in Spring 2021. Her poetry chapbook, boys in the electric age, is forthcoming from Tolsun Books in August 2021.