writings and performances by Nancy Murphy
On Sunday October 8, 2023 (2pm PST), Nancy will be featured in “Well-Versed Words,” a monthly online series created and curated by Alison Hurwitz, a widely published poet based in North Carolina.
Nancy’s poetry chapbook, The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence was reviewed in Cultural Daily by the poet George Franklin. It’s beautifully and thoughtfully written.
Nancy was invited to read her work at a long-running poetry series at the Claremont Library on September 23, 2023. She shared the reading with the Filipinx poet Angela Peñaredondo.
Nancy Murphy’s poetry chapbook, The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence will be published by Gyroscope Press on December 1 and will be available on Amazon.
Nancy Murphy’s chapbook manuscript for “The Space Carved by the Sharpness of Your Absence” was accepted by Gyroscope Press for publication in November 2022.
Nancy was invited to be a featured poet in Rick Lupert’s long-running weekly online poetry series Cobalt Poets.
(after Mark Strand, “A Piece of the Storm”)
From the California sky, silver sun slides into the kitchen
between the slats in the window shades. It taps on the table,
not impatiently. It doesn’t wait for me to notice, it is beyond
needing things like that from the world. I am reading the news
of the day, weeping, sipping breakfast tea from the other side
of the world, English tea is really from Assam, Ceylon,
Darjeeling. How I miss the mystery of the old names.
Sunlight tiptoes closer. I suddenly feel watched, look up,
light upon fuzzy headed treetops in the yard waltzing
with the glimmering from above. Doves are fluttering
their adoration for each other. I pour from the half full teapot.
Blue Heron Review, Issue 15, Fall 2022
The September 19, 2022 edition of SWWIM Every Day features “Dimming” by Nancy Murphy.
Click either image below to see Nancy Murphy’s September 20, 2022 reading of “Dimming” as well as others of her poems on Cobalt Poets, a long-running weekly reading and open mic series by Rick Lupert.
Let me tell you about leaving,
how it was almost
easy. Sometimes a mandarin
is so ripe that its skin wants
to be peeled, falls away
as your fingers get close,
pockets of air under the surface
waiting for release. I was ready
like that, open to other
hands, mouths, scents.
I feared being skipped over,
not picked in time. Frostbite.
At first it was a long December
then it was spring
in my step, everyone noticed.
Still I buried a guilt that
I could have done better,
that I had no right
to ripen. I had a secret
tally of faults that I used
against myself like a rainstorm.
I made judges out of accidental
men, took punishment
hungrily.xxxxxxxxxxUntil
it was enough. Only then
could I let myself look
back, see how smugly
we walked the streets
of Philadelphia, rapt,
wrapped around each other.
Then baby daughter
mornings in the corner
condo, LA beach sun
streaming in, smells
of talcum. Remember,
I said almost. We were once
a light, he and I.
What did we know
then of dimming?
SWWIM Every Day, September 19, 2022