Author and mother Emily Franklin tells a tale of children’s eating habits and peas…
Recipe: The Best Split Pea Soup Ever
01:30 – 9:55
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Poetry/Essays/Other Writing
Flânerie
Flânerie
By Emily Franklin
(this appeared in The Journal)
Around 1840 it was considered elegant to take a tortoise out
walking. This gives us an idea of the tempo of flânerie.
—Walter Benjamin
In the 1840s elegance was walking
your tortoise on a leash
My youngest had a pet ant
and then ate it by mistake
What can I tell you
What can I tell you
By Emily Franklin
(this appeared in The Rumpus)
except there is too much
spring already—damp frogs small as grapes
wood hyacinth bright as sugared cereal
fritillaries pink and sad-faced
crocus woozy and bent
Moorings / Walking the Dog in Autumn I Stop to Tie My Shoelace
Moorings / Walking the Dog in Autumn I Stop to Tie My Shoelace
By Emily Franklin
(this appeared in Lunch Ticket)
Suppose you say water.
We’re on the boat, making for Babson Island, one of three tiny beach slabs that connects at high tide. We set anchor, mark the drift, account for wind, row to the shallows. This place has sand dollars. You find some, bring them to me. I will wrap them in tissue to assure a safe journey, feel something split in me when one breaks years after the moments on this island. It’s funny how we know these things: A song will have meanings we can only guess at—the strains of trumpet or your daddy’s rich and your mama’s good-looking making me curl like a fist; the smell of soap, or brie cheese, these things will kill me later, but we don’t know this yet. For now, we’re still on shore, collecting things. Each piece of kelp, a malformed shell, the sand dollars. I want to fill my pockets with them, add them to the collection of you. Even broken, these objects will rest on the mantle as unruined remains.
That Time I Conducted an Autopsy Without Any Medical Training
That Time I Conducted an Autopsy Without Any Medical Training
By Emily Franklin
(this appeared in Narratively)
I angle the blade, looking down at the cadaver.
Before I press the scalpel into the body, I pause, swallowing saliva and fear. I don’t belong here.
But I do it anyway, cutting into the skin, which gives way, opening.
“Here we go,” I say.
The medical examiner puts down his crossword puzzle with a huff like I’m interrupting his quiet time. He looks at me, waiting. Does he also wonder what the hell I’m doing here?
miCRo: “Epigenetic Inheritance”
miCRo: “Epigenetic Inheritance”
By Emily Franklin
(this appeared in The Cincinnati Review)
Assistant Editor Chelsea Whitton: Franklin’s “Epigenetic Inheritance” explores the stakes and fallout of inherited trauma, how we retain its traces in our cells and pass it down. I love the way the poet uses stanza breaks to linger in the poem’s major assertions, and the way her imagery evokes the delicacy of life and the weight of the burdens we carry.
Qualities of the Modern Farmer
Qualities of the Modern Farmer
By Emily Franklin
(this appeared in The Times)
SOMEWHERE between two and three in the morning, hours before the police show up, Miller sits out in the field on a metal folding chair. Luna had offered a cushion but he’d turned her down and here he is with a cold ass and nearly drained coffee seasoned with Nubit, the liquor Luna makes from the pecans nobody wants to buy.
The unfeathering of the nest as my son leaves for college
The unfeathering of the nest as my son leaves for college
By Emily Franklin
(this appeared in Motherwell)
The almost-18-year-old removes a handmade sign from his bedroom wall.
“Should I keep it?” I look at the space where the sign has hung for the past three years, his last name and #13 in painted letters. Next to that space are other blanks—the Catalan independence flag space from his summer in Spain, the schooner sketch from his deckhand job.
“Take it with you or chuck it—or keep it here,” I say. “Those are the choices.” He slumps down on his bed, unsure.
“What about the soccer shirt?” He carefully unpins it, then apologizes for the holes left in the wall. “Look—it’s like I made constellations in the plaster.”