Poem of the Week | August 03, 2026

Gina Franco is the author of  The Accidental,  winner of the CantoMundo Prize, and  The Keepsake Storm. Her poems have appeared in  AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Narrative, Poet Lore, Poetry, 32 Poems,  and elsewhere. Her poem “The Line” is included in the Library of America anthology Latino Poetry, edited by Rigoberto Gonzalez. She teaches at Knox College and divides her time between Galesburg and Chicago, IL. 

“Still at Work, the Fault Opens” by Gina Franco is our Poem of the Week.

***

Still at Work, the Fault Opens 

Maybe I shouldn’t have stood
at the window watching the boy whip
the soft-eared dog with his leash
as they passed. Maybe I was newly risen
in my gown and no longer knew
the enemy as before. The mind blows
through the mind with the mouths
of its many heads and below hangs
the river by a thread, seamless river,
bottomless bed. Above it my father
surges from the bridge, leaps into brown
air where the wind seizes hold of him
and blows him back against the girders
as he plunges to the flood. The mind
enemies the mind back to life as if to rub
it warm with a rough toweling off. I didn’t
know it is the dead who speak of enemies.
The dog heaved on the leash, the boy lashed
after it. The dog, confused, winced then
chafed. The boy paused their walk
to shorten the lead to beat the dog,
the dog the color of embers and wood,
of flood water once the sun begins to set.
When my father rose from the water, his
pockets flush with glass, his arms filled
with the white-haired woman he’d pulled
from the car sinking fast to the bottom
of the river where still his knife must be
at the work of sawing free, he heaved up
the sodden bank into the mind of the storm
that kept raining down and delivered
the woman to the ambulance flare. Medics
changed her into a threadbare hospital
gown. One of the men gave my father a ride
to his mother’s house where her hands shook
the mud and glass into the grass and hung
his clothes on the line outside. We watched
him peel his clothes from his skin and drop
each piece like a body to the yard. It rained.
No one spoke. He winced, hosed himself
off, blew water from his mouth and nose.
Dead, being looked at, he didn’t look at us.
As when an enemy afoot will watch without
looking. As when my mother, hands
at her sides, stood by, and no one took
the lead to move. My father headed
inside, having finished. The boy released
the dog, the dog shook its body, licked
the boy’s hand and face. They passed
out of view. The fault that opens.
My mother, my father, lifting her in arms
to throw her, sack over fence, to the bed
of the drive. The time she was left to lie
unconscious at my feet. Still I stood.

***

Author’s Note

“Still at Work, the Fault Opens” is a poem from my manuscript Throne, and as with many of the poems in the book, it explores experiences where thought seeks closure just as what happened seems both unacceptable and incomprehensible. In the poem, thought moves through the knowing and unknowing of what it believes it sees and remembers, what it has felt and has been. If there is a fault at work, it is that some experiences keep opening beyond the mind’s tendency toward foreclosure. Thrown into experiences that leave us feeling culpable yet simultaneously helpless, memory is tempted to find an adversary.