“Anniversary” Published in Glassworks Magazine
Glassworks magazine published “Anniversary” in their Fall 2019 issue.
(more…)writings and performances by Nancy Murphy
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
Irish rain chases us around January, climbs
into our bodies seeking warmth.
Instead of romantic evenings,
we split packs of cough drops, turn
away in the dark; the space between us
thickens with my disappointment, gives me
reason to hold back.
We push forward on this road trip,
Connemara maroon hills bleed
into bright green fields, blue-black
north Atlantic waves. Wildflowers
find footing in forgotten soil.
There is resistance in this land,
survival, a refusal to surrender.
We stop in an ancient village, hold
hands, share a pot of tea. He pours
the milk in, then the tea. He makes mine
first every time. It’s unfair how he does that.
The silence between us softens,
almost like
forgiveness.
Glassworks, Fall 2019
Hear the author’s reading of “Anniversary,” recorded for Glassworks: Fall 2019.
Sheila-Na-Gig online published “How to Drive Off a Cliff” in their Volume 3.3, Spring 2019 issue.
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