Jenny, Laura, and Eleanor

The following persons who make up the titular characters, Jenny Longuet, Laura Lefargue (and her husband Paul), and Eleanor Aveling are Karl Marx’s daughters. While their father is noted as the founder of Marxism, Jenny, Laura, and Eleanor are talented journalists, activists, translators, and teachers of their own right. All three of them met tragic ends- Jenny, Marx’s eldest daughter, died from cancer, while Laura and Eleanor committed suicide. 

1. Jenny Longuet

 Jenny on the sickbed:

As the bugs with dust shells

saturate the laborers' intestines,

so do the treacherous lesser lords of

subsistence in my stomach. A cesspool

of  revolution, both inside & out.

Too soon, I will be blind to my sisters

& the ones whose skins have to be resewn.

In my father's crystal ball, perhaps, then,

impossibilities could be husked;

swapping tar for ink, for prune juice

stolen by mischievous vila

from sun-washed quarters.

2. Laura and Paul Lefargue

The Mourner:

The rose-watcher only sees

an asphodel, & a Polaroid

of wraiths in meadows.

Oil jackets have overrun

the verdure on the tatami floors, above,

paling red clouds unfurl

from being folded into talking kappas

spitting freshwater

for a miner's leathery lungs.

3. Eleanor Aveling

Eleanor, holding cyanide:

catacombs in the evening

dogs & diseases, spitting carnations

from self-crucifixions, carnage

& cyanide on mind

for the stubborn men of pig-stys,

for the traitor to my hearth

where rose syrups once boiled.

Hebe & war resigned to a

rusalka's fate; sour chrysanthemum tea

dripping on plantations, mankind's scourge.

Father, sisters, sit in the satin armchair

that was once Atlas beholden to scandalous trysts.

Yes. Tell me, about that vanishing red dream

of yours, before I swallow

ash gum & sublime rocks;

choke on breath,

all just to unravel deviant fates.

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Cover Photo courtesy of marx200.