Issue 25: Sheila E. Murphy
Executive Decision
May you be leafleted this lifetime, feathering the premises you walked. The green disturbing renovation of the earth retains your confidence, as if attracted channels singly that you wrought. Is tethering amendable at last? The fingering for F# holds its own in mind a spell. You want the frame to cast a spell toward the memoir her lips assemble and relay. Is there a way I might repay you for your divination now subsumed under my zeal? I water plants I did not plant. I thread the gimlet sight in which you bathe me. That one day might bathe myself in Labrador finesse, serving without skill thus weathering emergence for as long as concentration lasts. Give me a daisy from the pavement crack, that I might learn a fraction of the urgency then act. The milestones just refract. I plump them to insert into the silver.
Manifold in fact, these lumens broken into fractions, as the days come back
Mouth Organ
Replenish is the word. Hunger takes in, lets out to form music as (in)digestible. As speech. A peach. The limber leeway of a sonorous young thing. Steeled to indifference, always outer. The distance between maker and what is (being) made remains. Indistinguishable. The word yes as example. Intentional then freed. A simple symphony. The cost of doing versus being. One taking hold and letting go the other. Jubilant, too pure a word. More jaunt, more joust, more singular with fingerings thus whole. The holes. The many made as one.
Inner being doing being, everworld just here (now) tingling
In Retrospect
His depression owns me. I have carved a little place to watch the fiction of a life. How butterflied it was until I left the walls a color plain enough for safety. Now the minus signs take flight. Their aptitude for solace pins me down. I take my cues from watching justice network load stories to discern then watch someone resolve. Who in this equation should be paid to arbitrate straight-line depreciation? Fault lines prey upon routine until we have grown wild with history and try to get it back. Root words draw to romance language caught between harsh consonants and luscious vowels. I apple butter them into my seasoning as I respond. Are there no syllables to plant where sadness goes? He tells me splintered figments of another person’s life he fears is his. I talk myself away then veer into a tiny room. Some nice geometry repays my reach. How many diamonds leave the story when a crime seems just a matter of retrieving what was claimed?
Remorse, reversion, silence as a living thing
Sheila E. Murphy is an American poet who has been writing and publishing actively since 1978. Her book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (USA) and xPress(ed) (Finland). Also in 2018, Broken Sleep Books brought out the book As If To Tempt the Diatonic Marvel from the Ivory.
Luna Bisonte Prods released Underscore in that same year, featuring a collaborative visual book by K. S. Ernst and Sheila E. Murphy. Murphy is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). She earns her living as an organisational consultant, professor, and researcher and holds the PhD degree. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona .
Copyright © 2020 by Sheila E. Murphy, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
