Poetry Book Published
Nancy Murphy’s 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.
writings and performances by Nancy Murphy
Nancy Murphy’s 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
Issue 15 of the Blue Heron Review, published October 15, 2022, featured Nancy Murphy’s poem, “A Piece of the Calm.”
Nancy won an Aurora Poetry prize in late 2020. The winning poem “How Isolation Is Like Summer” was just published.
Remember the slow heaviness of August
in Albany,
the 60s, sixth grade
everything exhausting
from humidity,
excessive greenery suffocating,
days stretching in our hands like
the wonder of boardwalk
taffy that never breaks, it just gets thinner
and thinner and thinner.
Remember when effort was pointless,
when summer kept us
low to the ground, sitting in the art
of doing nothing, tree filtered sunlight
moving across our freckled faces
as we spoke
quietly, like whispers might keep us
cooler.
Picture us young, self-contained, still
whole. Breathing the not knowing
of life like
it was our daily bread.
Oh the trouble with looking
for things, what you find.
This impossible brokenness of
motherlessness,
how that grief lies in wait for you,
coiled, attacks only in self
defense, no one wants
to be forgotten. Memory
is a mother.
Is all this time on our hands
keeping us safe
from ourselves?
Maybe we need
to reopen, I’m dreaming
of a long drive to the mountains,
any mountains.
Aurora Poetry, Vol. 4, July 2022