Issue 1.2
Fall 2021
Erin Murphy
Reflection
In early March 2020, our adult son came home for a five-day spring break and stayed fifteen months. The university town where he is a graduate student was a COVID-19 hot spot, so it seemed safer for him to quarantine with us in rural Pennsylvania. My husband and I had been empty nesters for several years, and so—like many parents—we were thrust into navigating both the chaos of the pandemic and a return to a type of family life we’d assumed was over. It was an intense time, one that blurred the concepts of parent/child, past/present, interior/exterior, fear/control. My poems have always been associative and self-reflexive, but what I wrote during this period was more overtly so, with the poems themselves acknowledging that they are propelled by external influences.
I Feel So Damned Intransitive
The way barley is forced to germinate,
then halted and dried
mid-sprout.
Malt: verb and noun [melt, moult,
if the Wicked
Witch had shrieked
I’m moulting, moulting!]. We all long
to slough off
[slog + laugh] these
extra fragments of fleece
and fat and sit
bare-shouldered
in the cricket-thick night, glass
of gin dripping
with condensation
[or condescension, such
haughty hooch].
What was the name
of Tom Cruise’s co-pilot in Top Gun?
Gooch? No, Goose—
the same actor
from ER whose character died
of an inoperable
tumor [opera].
The neurosurgeon who saved
my husband’s life
played Puccini
in the OR. He looked twelve
and wore Vans,
as if he’d
skateboarded to the hospital
that morning,
his white coat
​
trailing like a bride’s veil
[Vail: snowy slopes].
In the game
Climbing Grammar Mountain,
students ascend or fall
with each attempt
to correct a sentence [unit of words,
length of a prison term].
Complete sentence.
Life sentence. Life is a sentence
is a sentence
we never learn.
Erin Murphy’s latest book, Human Resources, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, Diode, Southern Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is Professor of English at Penn State Altoona. Website: www.erin-murphy.com
Erin's Book Recommendation
The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Jeffers blurs the boundaries between past and present in these documentary poems, reminding us that history is, at its root, a story.