Break: Obligatory lighthearted scene in a zombie flick where poet enjoys herself

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Jordan E. Franklin

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I wake up and there’s no despair, only potential.
The world blinked out but it’s not the end of the world,
just the end of bad poetry. All metaphors stagger on raw
and unexplained. No more memoirs hobbled and enjambed
to moonlight as poems. No one to feed ideas into the mouth
of a black-coded computer, force it to spit verse out like teeth.
No one around to deny its merit or call it “inhuman.” Now
there will be Black poems worked in black ink by a Black
hand and no professors around to police or kill them
if they dare to take up a page in a way they can’t market.
Verse so Black, it wears its hoodies in the dawn, stops
by a store or a crosswalk and just loses its mind. I don’t have
to tell anyone why the mother doesn’t return or where
the father lies. My poems will be naked and plump
as my tongue. They’ll walk. They’ll sing.
They’ll regrow their limbs and flesh.

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Jordan E. Franklin (she/her) hails from Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Stony Brook Southampton and is a doctoral candidate at Binghamton University. She is the author of the poetry collection, when the signals come home (Switchback Books), and the chapbook, boys in the electric age (Tolsun Books). Her work has appeared in Breadcrumbs, Frontier, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, the Southampton Review and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2017 James Hearst Poetry Prize and the 2020 Gatewood Prize.

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