On Our First Walk in Three Weeks

Fear fills my neighbors’ sunken eyes—
their mouths obscured by make-shift
masks. All week, contractors in hazmat

suits dig temporary mass graves
on Hart Island, where the first victims
of AIDS and abandoned disabled

children were stacked when nobody
wanted to think about how easy it is
to hide illness and imperfection.

The daffodils look old-fashioned
this spring, like ruffles on dresses
my mother forced me to wear

in grade school. My sick daughter
walks beside me, not knowing
the world is wounded. I prompt

her hands back to her pockets again
and again so she won’t touch anything
even in the park. For seventeen years,

her disease has kept us inside
our apartment more days than we
ventured out into the city. I used to think

of Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day.”
This is worse. The sun shines
but we cannot go outside to feel it.

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Jennifer Franklin (AB Brown University, MFA Columbia University School of the Arts) is the author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books 2018) and Looming (Elixir 2015). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Boston Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, JAMA, Love’s Executive Order, The Nation, Paris Review, Plume, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, and Prairie Schooner. She currently teaches poetry in Manhattanville’s MFA program. She is co-editor of Slapering Hol Press and teaches manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she runs the reading series and serves as Program Director. She lives in New York City.