Talking Craft: Interview with Nancy Murphy at Cultural Daily
Nancy was a featured poet for “Poets on Craft” at Cultural Daily, an online arts and culture magazine.
(more…)Nancy Murphy / Writer
writings and performances by Nancy Murphy
“Sometimes a Wild Saint” Published in Gyroscope Review
The Summer 2021 Issue of Gyroscope Review includes “Sometimes a Wild Saint.”
(more…)Sometimes a Wild Saint
After Tom Hiron, Sometimes a Wild God
Sometimes a wild saint will storm in while
you’re at the stove
searing steaks,
tapping smoked paprika
onto sweet potatoes. She’ll start
a fire in the blue room, open the best
Burgundy without asking,
crank up
the Stones. Sometimes a wild saint
is not exactly
drunk, (but not undrunk)
maybe beyond
drunk like I was
in my twenties after work
in bars with married co-workers.
I’m not here to confess, I’ll just say
I have seen how things can break
down, how anything can be
forgiven, how miracles are not
that rare really.
Sometimes a wild saint
is such a martyr, deadly
serious. But I’m
not going to fall
into that deep
well of belief again, the longing
that follows, all that embarrassment
when god doesn’t show up
in time.
Sometimes a wild saint
will remind us that there will be summer
again, that I will be able to go underwater
and feel cool on my entire head
and not even care
if my hair ever
dries.
Gyroscope Review, Issue 21-3, Summer 2021
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“Know My Tree” Published in Telephone Exhibition
The international arts game published the poem “Know My Tree” in their April 2021 online launch.
(more…)Know My Tree
Know My Tree
A tree is a prayer without words, without reason, without apology. Yet
not without sound, I hear
a low whirr when I am close to a willow, I see the medicine of its
knowledge dance under dark
purple bark. I trace the lines of its hands to the ends of the limbs I
want to climb, watch
how leaves confetti in the breeze, an explosion of spring greens and
saffron
yellows against an afternoon indigo sky. I want
to rest, hang from my tail,
sleep and eat
like an animal.
I want to know
my animal. I want
to know my god.
I want to know
my tree.
I need to be
washed in a rain
of forest, cleansed
of my faults,
my failings,
my falsities.
All the moments
I could have
done better.
We are all
standing under
some tree,
of life, of death,
of transformation.
How thankless
I’ve been! I wish
to save a tree
to save myself
to save
the world.
I don’t know
where to start
so I will just
start with this
tree under a black
sky believing in the sun.
Telephone, April 2021
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Flappers Comedy Club August 2020
“Field of View” Published in The Ekphrastic Review
The Ekphrastic Review published “Field of View” in their July 2020 issue.
(more…)Field of View
-after “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth
I am a stretched canvas. My mother’s
yearning background color. Dress dusty
pink the color of my first ballet slippers,
hair putting up a fight. Thin black belt around
my nickel of a waist, it takes me years
to become a body. Walking even longer.
The field is everything to me. The way sunlight
wakes up the colours, the way the hint
of a road slices space into before
and after, the way home keeps moving
away. Collapsing onto the grass,
oblivious to how it can stain you,
mark you as a child. When do we start
seeing the world as wider than we can
hold? I paint myself away from the edges
of the picture, on another coast, different
weather. I paint the story of my mother
and what she wanted. I remember when
she gazed on me, and when she gazed not
on me. I carry hollowness into the rain.
The Ekphrastic Review, July 2020
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“Father (Mother)” Published in Stoneboat Literary Journal
Stoneboat Literary Journal published “Father (Mother)” in their Spring 2019 issue.
(more…)“Anniversary” [recorded reading]
Reading by Nancy Murphy of “Anniversary,” recorded Fall 2019 for Glassworks magazine.
