Still Life with Gold — Blackbird Archive

← v19n1, Spring 2020

Nothing organic remains. Wooden caskets

cradle pomegranate beads, combs, earrings.

You are familiar with this ritual of adorning

flesh with ornaments that will outlast. Gold

diadems and crowns host two cicadas

and a bee. Untouched in plastic cases

they perch on gray velvet stands. The gods

the Greeks cherished, now cherish us,

our greedy stares and Protean desires. This

is what the earth chooses to preserve, what

it can’t use. Open tombs reveal strewn jewels

and dried fruit. You impose desire onto corpses

you can’t see. You love what you want them

to have been. This is just one version

of an afterlife. You leave to buy replicas

of bronze baubles that hung from each branch

of their bodies. You smell the faint aroma

of what they once parted their lips to taste.

mortality history death

Jennifer Franklin

Jennifer Franklin is the author of two poetry collections: No Small Gift (Forthcoming from Four Way Books, 2018) and Looming (Elixir Press, 2015), which won the 14th Annual Elixir Press Editor’s Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Boston Review , The Nation , The Paris Review , and elsewhere. A selection of her poetry is featured in Andrew Solomon’s award winning book, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity (Scribner, 2013). She received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts where she was a Harvey Baker Fellow. Franklin teaches poetry workshops and seminars at The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center where she serves as the program director, and she is a coeditor of Slapering Hol Press, the small press imprint of The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. She lives in New York City. Photo by Arnaldo Reyes