After the Election

All morning, I read Kafka.

During the inauguration,

we do not watch the news,

 

knowing the new orders and acts

will harm our daughter.

We swallow bread with friends

 

under lights strung from their

ceiling. Candles burn

as the rescue dog hovers by our

 

feet. Virginia Woolf wrote,

though L. says he has petrol

in the garage for suicide

 

should Hitler win, we go on.

When we finally return home,

the rooms are empty. Where

 

flowers once hung, the wall holds

a mirror. It shows us

our faces wherever we turn.

 

“After the Election” was written on the inauguration day of Trump’s second presidency while thinking about all the Constitutional rights and social services that I knew would be stripped from people in our country after reading the plans described in Project 2025. The poem explores the speaker’s mixture of dread, helplessness, complicity, and desire to resist. It’s part of my new manuscript, A Fire In Her Brain—a collection of epistolary poems to Virginia Woolf, Lucia Joyce, and Sylvia Plath.

Jennifer Franklin is a poet, professor, and editor whose last book was If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023). Her awards include a Pushcart Prize, a NYFA/City Artist Corp grant, and a residency from the T.S. Eliot Foundation. She leads four year-long manuscript revision workshops. teaches in Manhattanville’s MFA Program, and lives in New York with her husband, daughter, and rescue pitbull.