Assistant Editor Chelsea Whitton: Franklin’s “Epigenetic Inheritance” explores the stakes and fallout of inherited trauma, how we retain its traces in our cells and pass it down. I love the way the poet uses stanza breaks to linger in the poem’s major assertions, and the way her imagery evokes the delicacy of life and the weight of the burdens we carry.
To hear Emily read her poem, click below:
Epigenetic Inheritance
Girls born to Dutch mothers in the famine
had greater risk of schizophrenia.
Fathers who smoked before puberty
had heftier sons. Just what
have you done? We don’t know
how all this is passed parent to child.
Genetic information in sperm and eggs
shouldn’t be affected by the environment
and yet here are lab mice. Here, too,
cherry blossoms. Think of it:
the Swan Lake of flowering trees,
the scent of which—when paired
with small electric shocks—trains for fear.
Even the smell without the pain
is enough to make mice shudder.
Then those mice have babies.
Their offspring—gray, brown, soft
as eyelashes—have only to smell
cherry blossom to twitch. The memory
of pain, revulsion, doom embedded.
How irresponsible these genes,
producing receptors that sense blossom
or mothering. Fearsome mystery
that inheritance of sorrow, unable to let go.
Emily Franklin‘s work has been published in the New York Times, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Mississippi Review, and Chattahoochee Review, among other places, as well as read aloud on National Public Radio and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. She is the author of numerous novels and recently completed her first poetry collection.
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