FEATURED POET: MICHELLE MURPHY

THREE POEMS by Michelle Murphy

How to Canter under Anesthesia

This is how we roll

lightning

a starfish in our eye or gun

fired (synapsis                before going

under another wave

We wail thread

our forearms with initials

veins slit wounded blue

Smooth the grass down smooth

our heartbeats against the blades

when our palms unfold

we can read the future

Excuse me if there’s something

I need When your blood runs hot

it rattles through these stories

This is not the first time I’ve lost

to faith or faith has lost

to me The river freezes

my arteries drags me under painless

and I emerge rock torn bone

scraped waiting to be wrung

out left to dry on a shore of white gravel

This is how we roll

I thought your shadow was

a ghost or maybe

moving out of any frame

of reference moving from one

road to another without

consequence or direction Converted

without knowing to flesh

At any rate we say

moving the conversation

whatever is left sweeping the vowels into

open pockets where ghosts dig

deep scrape like snakes amid the seams

I stopped looking

for omens except occasionally

when the moon evacuates the sky and stars

tip at the Sierra’s edge

or I touch you & all the poisons

that vein my breasts momentarily wane

there is just this my body of stitched

horses cantering proceeding without

a compass, only stars

Synonym for Home

1. Abode.  Any living space is space living. We are living above the Jiffy Lube and then it’s August, not much left in the refrigerator. "Look under the couch" often used jocularly in a mock-formal tone.

2. Apartment: A living space consisting. Coexisting. Conjuring. Conning. There’s a circling, a wand of pale dolor sprinkled over the furniture. You are telling a story that involves figures I’ve never met. We are of one or more rooms about it, a complex unit of two.  

3. Billet: Quarters in a private home assigned to shadows, to footsteps and military order, to “Anonymous.” You have decided to grow a mustache and look so much like a deceased relative that your great aunt holds out her hand, traces her finger over your lips. "Welcome home," she says.

4. Boardinghouse: A house that provides some room. I sleep with one eye open.  Multiple latches and locks and an arsonist lives below, never looks me in eye. He stares at my boots. ”Those are boy’s shoes,” he says. We stand in the kitchen, and watch our bagels burn.

5. Bungalow: A small one-or one-and-a-half-story house. The kind we dreamed as kids.  We’d live in this bungalow with two or more rabbits, make crepes and grow lemon trees. The story ends there.

6. Cabin: Originally, a small, crudely constructed one-story dwelling. One made of gingerbread or graham cracker paths, a place where ovens run too hot for comfort. This one has four identical beds; four identical blue plaid comforters. Often refers to memories we’ve left unassigned, amorphous. Scratches on the bathroom door are courtesy of a long dead dog. A watercolor of a boat that isn't. A vacation home may be quite large or psychically complex.

7. Caravan: A British English synonym for trailer. In Germany after a long day fighting with her boyfriend, the mother takes off in the Volkswagen camper, her boyfriend left to fend for himself.  Exhausted, she parks on the outskirts of a dark town. At night there are voices; gypsies quietly speaking near the van, discussing this and that.  The mother whispers in her sleep.

Intermezzo & Single Tanka

I couldn’t save you

from this coup of crazy

its syllables branching out across this land

rambling, and that’s not the worst of it

I couldn’t save myself.

What is it you’re trying to say &

I don’t know anymore.  

At the edge of this neglected rose

garden of bifurcated thorn and browning branch

past soil the color of wood ash, a cottonwood tree, full of June

sheds across public boundaries, splashes

a reverse Rorschach of white over the Truckee River.

Your bed levitates at night, you believe, a zeppelin rising

above this nursing home, leaving it all behind.

Pull of memory’s half tones,

& large-scale absences means that only a plumb line

can begin to measure amnesia’s depth,

the steep slope of evaporation as one western season

ends and vapor beads rise above the earth’s core

out of the electric chatter’s frame.

A photograph scaled to fit a family

momentarily removes displacement.

Tilt & relief.

Everything happens

outside this pair of photos

fugues overlap

please don’t step too far to the left

the frame can not hold you

I try to recall a line map

of birthdays, of roads reeled,

your gray eyes, language soughed in ungentle sloping,

crowding numbers on a clock,

trading lapses for a cloistered lexicon to

and box of Papermate felt tip pens.

(or were they blue?)

A drawing composed of subdivided lines,

of meter.

Particular boundaries are singular.

Particular memory is entered.

Tides move particularly inside a full moon

neurons firing, reconstructing

a map of syntax and confabulation.

Red-tailed hawks glide the currents of your mind-sky,

you shoo them away with a sweep of your hand.

Watch the river recede in inches, listen as stones

clatter across this deafening shore.

Sagebrush, rabbitbrush, greasewood and willow;

dolls, card games, cadenza – a fervent gleaning of names,

this certain sweeping away.

Under is another story

with vowels bright, spit-shined,

particular as sudden singular.

[”Synonym for Home” and “Intermezzo & Single Tanka” were first published in VERSE/Volume 33 (editors: Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki, University of Richmond).

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Michelle Murphy is the author of the chapbook The Tongue in its Shelf (Standing Stones Press) and full-length collection Jackknife & Light (Avec Books) shortlisted for the National Poetry Series as well as the PEN West Literary Award. Recent work includes poetry in Barzakh, The American Journal of Poetry, (b)OINK, and a chapbook (portfolio) of poems in VERSE Journal as a finalist in the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize . She lives in Reno, Nevada.