print previewback JENNIFER FRANKLIN
Lucia Anna and Anna Livia—Both Named by James Joyce
Dear Lucia—I’m writing to you
but you can’t answer.
You can’t answer but I am
writing to you. Because you
can’t answer, I am writing.
I was nineteen when I first found you—
I am sitting down; in a few hours
I will be lying down. Your life is read
backwards, everything examined
under the magnifying glass of your diagnosis.
You were always standing at the window—
watching everyone you loved leaving.
Everyone you loved left. You were at the window
watching and you said you were always left
(always alone) like pigs in a sty.
A pig, a sty—those cramped and moldy rooms
where you had no privacy. Nowhere
to be alone to practice dance. But then you were alone.
Alone for thirty years. By the window.
Everyone agrees it all began when you threw a chair
at your mother. Maybe it was your diagnosis.
Or maybe you could no longer suffer
her disappointment. Your first memory—her voice
yelling about breaking the doll. The doll’s head
was broken. She said you broke it. (I would have thrown
a chair at her too if she were my mother.) She always
blamed you. You were always wrong wrong wrong.
Lucia, is it wrong how long I have grieved over you?
Thirty years and you are still surfacing.
I have stopped trying to ignore your voice.
I found the photo I taped on the nightstand
in my dorm room and fit it for a tarnished
silver frame. Your sideways stare looks into the distance.
Your father believed you were a genius.
I see you as he saw you—full of promise
and passion. I want to believe if he had not died,
he would have visited you. No one moved
like you—gold-beaded and fish-scaled sad, slow sorrow,
stealth of a beast. Beckett kept that photo of you
in his desk for sixty years though he visited you only once
in the sanatorium. In photographs, you are always looking
off to the side as if the world hurts too much to face.
Forced to give up dancing, you cried for a month.
Lucia, illuminator, maker of light.
Like the white marble statues unearthed in Greece
with only traces of the color that once covered them,
you are some diminished version of your real self—
bowed, fish-scaled, savage. The more I try to find you,
the further you slip away back into the asylums,
up in smoke with your letters that the men burned to silence you.
I cannot save you but I will not leave you. Your last decision
was to not be buried beside them. Come out
into the light, Lucia. Cut the phone wires. No one is listening.
Come home come home. Come home. Live here
with my wild girl—born eight years after I found you.
Dear Anna Livia—I’m writing to you
but you can’t answer.
You can’t answer but I am
writing to you. Because you
can’t answer, I am writing.
I was twenty-nine when I discovered your diagnosis—
In the great green room there was a telephone
and a red balloon. I read your life
backwards, everything examined
under the magnifying glass of your diagnosis.
Your father wouldn’t bring you to the doctor
until you pulled the floor lamp down
and it shattered like our life around your two-year-old
body. Maybe it was your diagnosis.
Or maybe you could no longer suffer his disappointment.
Is your first memory your father’s voice, yelling?
He couldn’t believe you were not a genius.
That you wouldn’t be a doctor like him.
He always blamed you. You were always wrong
wrong wrong. Anna, is it wrong how long I have grieved over you?
You are always standing at the window—
watching everyone you love leaving.
Almost everyone you loved left. You are at the window
watching, it’s New York. Both of you—go now
to the window, sit on the bench and watch them walk away—
some for respite, some for a life without worry.
Watch them walk away from you, watch them
at the window while you ask for them. They do not
turn around after they leave. Your father
has not seen you in six years. He will never visit you again.
Anna, in photographs, you are always looking off to the side
as if the world hurts too much to face.
I cannot save you but I will not leave. Unable to sleep
in this musty apartment, I am coughing to death
as I watch over you—unable to decipher your cryptic chatter.
Lucia Anna—you’re still dancing low to the ground,
creeping across the floor, shoeless.
Anna Livia—you’re dancing, arms flailing,
the same way you move in water.
You both sprawl your letters across the table—painting,
talking to yourselves. I will never tell you to be quiet.
There is nothing that hurts me more than the sight
of your beautiful faces—your bobbed heads bent
over the alphabet, adding color to each corner
of the familiar shapes. Come home come home. Come home. 
Lucia Anna & Anna Livia—Both Named by James Joyce
Parable