Sheila E. Murphy’s most recent books are October Sequence: Sections 1-51 (mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press, 2023), Sostenuto (Luna Bisonte Prods (2023) and Golden Milk (Luna Bisonte Prods, 2020). Murphy has authored 45 books of poetry.

I Mostly

Prefer not to 
hear a story,
despite the fashion
of its multiplication.

I mean listening
is a chore.
For a long
windowful time taking

in how mindlike
the body with
ears functions thus.
I would prefer

I hear you
singing from distance.
I could choose
then one song.

Perhaps to delete
or refashion into
a prayer answered
after being asked.

Transfer

The house that was my clothing
you wear now, its vibrations
that filled it perhaps have risen 
to smooth new ceilings

now protecting you. May you
incur each fragment of quiet
left there. May you own
a smidge of selfhood still 

basking in a precious history 
made recent in eternal
way of being not 
fungible after all, who

memorizes life in syllables
that function only when
combined into a whispered
language necessitating fluency?

Late July

Shining dissonance defies my struggle soon evaporating. Music does not happen by itself. Music happens by itself. Am I a midwife catching a tiny squalling miracle in my moist hands? Or the archer taking aim beyond anxiety? Time allows nothing but an eraser to remove what has not belonged. Apart from longing, white clouds relax into rain, small and huge at once. I do not opine about the rain. I rinse my life, clap hands, I treasure what the ducks may know along the pond where they glide and grow, accept the seeds tossed into dark water.

Suddenness, a fiction, green surrounding branches long and lean