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.
(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
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
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
After my mother died, I left my husband.
He had always been a rock
but I stumbled upon someone more
like fire, and I needed to ignite,
breathe into the blue edge of a flame,
find myself in what remained.
It’s Friday night, I slice into red peppers.
My new man scorches them on the grill
along with sweet corn, chicken in dried
thyme, Spanish olive oil. Together
ten years and I still call him new.
This is just how I talk, tell myself I’m free,
remind myself that I could be reduced to ashes
again. Sometimes I’m afraid that only burning
can purge this longing, for all that’s lost,
for those careless nights and all that blazed.
Montana Mouthful, February 2022
Glassworks magazine published “Anniversary” in their Fall 2019 issue.
(more…)As you climb the mountainside hugging
the unguarded road, you imagine the worst.
You push on because there is an empty beach
between two rocks calling from the other
side and you want to be alone. You want to feel
honeyed sun on the top of your head as you
watch waves tap out messages on the sand.
You want to break the code. As the car
accelerates, your hands search the stitching
along the wheel, you notice the soft spots,
recall all the miles this body has taken you.
The wine colored mountains your eyes
are following on the horizon recede as you miss
the last turn and start the somersault down.
Nearby sheep graze, one locks eyes with you,
silently asks if there is something you need,
you both know it is too late. You nod
back in gratitude to the animal and let go like
you have just arranged that last pillow before
sleep. In your mouth, a familiar bittersweet,
not unlike that last sip from your morning tea cup,
a mix of milk and leaves and debris at the bottom.
Sheila-Na-Gig, Volume 3.3, Spring 2019
My father’s hearing is starting to go;
he chooses to miss things, refuses an aid,
doesn’t hear the 2 a.m. phone
call. I am the one who tells him
five hours later, Lee passed in the night.
I am the one who absorbs his shock
and sob. I thought he was prepared
but bad news is like that. She is the second
wife he has survived, the first my mother
twenty-five years ago. When I arrive
at his door that day, we make our usual
resemblance of an embrace, his eighty-eight
year old frame bent into a C, keeping
his heart from me. We sit side by side on the sofa,
the vintage flowered wallpaper suddenly
alive as if communing with Lee’s wild
garden outside the front window, the roses
bloom that week. I rub his bony back like
he is my child. The only other time I saw
him cry, at LAX arrivals,
my daughter three weeks old, my mother
two weeks gone. Me seeing him, him seeing
mine, all that living and dying, all that
unreasonable pain.
I missed my mother’s funeral, too soon
after birth to fly. My father tells me he is the same sad
now as then and I feel betrayed. My parents
married forty-one years, isn’t time how you
measure grief? He writes a eulogy
for Lee, then falters, I agree
to stand in for him. He depends on me
that way. I take him to doctor appointments,
repeat orders. He does what he likes, ignores
the rule about salt, declines a daily walk.
We know he won’t live forever, but jesus
he has to try. He returns home, lives with my
brother in the old house. Everyone else
helps. Some days I feel like seaweed
come loose from the ocean floor, unmoored,
drifting away until you can’t see me.
I am no longer the mother.
No one is the mother now.
Stoneboat Literary Journal, Spring 2019