Three Poems by Abby E. Murray

What It’s Like to Wonder Whose Country It Was First

It’s a bit like counting backward by last names
in search of one that’s never been claimed
by a man. You end up tallying centuries like beads
on a rosary, thousands of generations of names
owned and assigned by fathers and sons, fathers
and sons, until you see how we, the non-men,
survived before names even came to be.
Isn’t it likely that, pre-speech, we recognized land
as the body that grew us like flowers, or figs?
Isn’t each of us named after water and sun
in words only our mother can pronounce?
There have always been more than enough
weeds to pull and seeds to bury. What a waste
of energy it would have been then, to call a river
ours but not yours, to decide for a shoreline
which children it could hold on its hip. And yet,
it must have happened: a drink from a stream
so perfect it broke a man’s heart. In his grief,
he called it his, and we’ve been dying ever since.

* 

Ode to an Invasive Species

My friend reminds me cats
are an invasive species,
citing every songbird she’s found
disemboweled on her doorstep.
What she means is, feeding one animal
is the same as killing another,
and what I mean is, I don’t know
how to unlove a thing once I love it.
I used to think shame could teach me,
but here I am, still dumbstruck
by the generator in my cat’s tiny throat,
the one she cranks to life in exchange
for any kindness I show her,
offering me her own broken song.
Here I am, smacking a sparrow
from her mouth, then giving it water
and a shoebox where it can rest
because I want it all, my version of peace
everywhere, which I think
makes me an invasive species too.
I spend most days trying to be good
while knowing I’m not, not completely,
and trying not to be crushed even though
I couldn’t live without deserving it.

* 

On the First Day of School

I draw a wave that reaches
from the back of my daughter’s hand

up her arm, across her shoulders,
then down her other arm

to lap against the knuckles
of her opposite hand. I tell her

this is a river, and it belongs
only to her, for as long as she lives.

She likes this: the inheritance
of a body of water in lieu

of her own body, which harbors
many unnamed currents.

Her girl-not-girl-not-boy face
gleams like an agate among stones.

For now, she is her. I tell her
every word and glance she feels today

is a leaf, a spider, a lily, sometimes
a paper boat made just for her—

they float on the surface of her river.
Keep the ones you need, I say.

What about the rest? she asks.
She is trying to decide if the gift

I’m offering is too simple to be true,
or too true to be simple.

Reader, I am too. The river
sends the rest away, I say.

Her eyes are two pools
where memory twirls like a fish,

something bright in the dark—
a kindness she’s fed to some

thoughtful koi—but rejection
festers there too, aggressive

and determined as pike.
She’ll need to know them both.

I pack these metaphors
like firm mud for her to stand on

and she walks to school
where I can’t follow,

her hands empty as mine were
when I waded into my life,

ready to pick up what there is
to be found, to be held, or let go.

*

Abby E. Murray is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Her first book of poems, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2020 Washington State Book Award. She served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.