George Franklin
$17.00 ($4.63 US Shipping per order)
$13.60 pre-order special through June 30
George Franklin practices law in Miami. Poetry & Pigeons: Short Essays on Writing was published by SheilaNa-Gig Editions in January 2025. A Man Made of Stories is his fourth full-length poetry collection forthcoming soon from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, complementing Remote Cities (2023) Noise of the World (2020) and Traveling for No Good Reason (winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions manuscript competition in 2018). He has also authored the dual-language collection, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas (translated by Ximena Gómez and published by Katakana Editores, 2020), and a chapbook, Travels of the Angel of Sorrow (Blue Cedar Press, 2020). He is the co-translator, along with the author, of Ximena Gómez’s Último día / Last Day and co-author with Gómez of Conversaciones sobre agua / Conversations About Water (Katakana Editores 2019 & 2023).
Check out all of George’s SheilaNa-Gig Editions titles!
A Normal Life
I am who I am. It’s probably too late
To change or pretend to change. These backyard
Shadows cast against a wooden fence
Remind me of Sorolla, his paintings filled
With light and foliage, an afternoon sliding
Into evening. It’s a good thing I don’t
Take history personally. Otherwise, I’d
Find it cruel to lose a country at an age
When friends die of heart attacks before I
Learn they’re sick. When I say lose,
I mean it’s a country that doesn’t feel like
Mine anymore. And those persistent ads
From online gun shops—they make me think
My neighbors are stocking up for some
Climactic shootout with brown-skinned
Gangs of sicarios or some other movie fantasy.
Still, we wave to each other when I walk my dog
And they walk theirs, and we say hello
At the supermarket, realizing our shopping carts
Contain the same flour, chicken, coffee, and fruit.
I try not to imagine the excuses we’ll use later
To keep up the appearance of a normal life.
Last year, I sat in the garden of Sorolla’s
House in Madrid, the light tinted by camellia
Blossoms, the shadows by dark green leaves.
The dictatorship there lasted almost half
A lifetime, thirty-six years if you’re counting.
In Barcelona, we saw the pastry shop
Where Franco ate. I don’t know which
Pastries he chose—I hope not the same ones
I did. We tell ourselves that politics is
Unavoidable but untrustworthy. Only time
Is a reliable ally. Dictators get old and
Choke on their pastries. The understudies
Who wait offstage grow impatient, their
Lines already memorized. Young officers
Preen their feathers in front of the mirror
And think how tired they are of saluting.
One aging senator tells an embarrassing
Anecdote about another, one too many times.
Meanwhile, the days, like senile relatives,
Repeat the same stories, and we console
Each other, impotently, so impotently,
Telling those same repeated stories,
painted shadows and camellia blossoms,
Dark green foliage blocking the light.
A Man Made of Stories
Where to begin? The tips of his fingers, his toenails?
Each could tell you about the war, about his family, the uncle
Whose body was never found, the letter a woman wrote to him afterwards,
Thinking her child might be his. No one sent her an answer, even
To tell her he was probably dead. The palms of the hands: smooth but
With lines a fortune teller could spend hours interpreting, the love line
Filled with interruptions, infidelities—his own and those of others—
The life line surrounded by lines of protection, good luck, an old age
Without deprivation. The mound of Venus was large and fleshy.
He was passionate, and women had desired him. There was a scar
On his knee where he fell as a child and another on his forehead, half-
Hidden by his hair, a war wound from a fight with neighboring kids,
The armies on opposite sides of a fence. He’d climbed it and got a stick
Thrust at his eye for his trouble. It just missed. As a teenager,
He’d slouched in the park with friends at night, smoked marijuana
And drank bad wine. The sticky taste still hides somewhere
On the roof of his mouth. His tongue avoids it. His nose has changed
As he’s gotten older. Each office where he worked had a different smell,
Desks where others had typed, left aspirin in the right-hand drawer. Their
Bodies had molded the chair back. Oil from the hair of other men made
Shiny the top edge of the chair. Had they fallen asleep when
No one was looking, as he had? His nose remembered the astringent
Smell of hair tonic and the smell of the disinfectant they used on
The bathroom floors. (He never called it a restroom.) His ears
Recalled a man coughing two stalls away, the toilet’s flush, the water
At the sink. There was a small mole on his arm in the exact
Same spot where his father had such a mole. He spent his life afraid
He would become his father, frustrated, impatient, disappointed in himself,
Eager for the approval of others. Luckily, his eyes were different. His father
Had blue eyes; his were brown. But their hair was similar, thinning as he aged.
Each pore of his skin seemed to him like a well, one that could swallow him
And from which he’d never climb out. He looked at himself in the mirror,
Examining that spot between his nostrils and his cheek. To him, it was an
Alien planet. Whiskers grew nearby. He shaved them, but each morning they
Returned, just to spite him. Each had a story of its own.
