She Wants to Live

For her tenth birthday she receives a pale jade bracelet
with a shark charm and a QR code on the price tag,

which we use to download an app on my phone
and track Boo, the young female hammerhead swimming

laps around the Bahamas at .2 mph. Every morning since,
we’ve logged in to see how far Boo has traveled

in what might seem to be lazy triangles across the Tongue
of the Ocean, a dark chasm yawning at the bottom

of the Atlantic, even though we suspect how industrious
Boo must be to survive—that her path must be as deliberate

and careful as it is beyond any faraway child’s control,
no matter how true that child’s love is. When my daughter

blew out the single candle on her cupcake I told her
she is halfway old enough to set out on her own because

this news would have thrilled me at her age, and she cried,
said why would you tell me that! and I remembered how,

at her age, I’d attended zero protests, marched for human rights
roughly never, heard no constant reporting on the slaughter

of children, both here and abroad, and although my own
shoulders had been saddled with poverty, I carried no words

for its implications and origins. I didn’t know what it meant
to be powerless or complicit. I had not held my mother’s hand

outside the White House and screamed, our words swallowed up
by its depth, its capacity to consume even light. My daughter

is ten and like most ten-year-olds, she wants to live as if it is
not just an evolutionary chore to avoid the alternative

but also her joy. She wants to dive through the void
knowing safety will carry her like a wave. That said,

the world she’ll inherit leaves her wanting her mother
for as long as possible. Longer. How could I blame her?

While she’s at school, I check on Boo’s blinking transmitter,
notice she hasn’t surfaced yet today but is headed back

from the deep toward a shallow she clings to, a golden arm of sand
that’s been there, open to the abyss, since long before she was born.

*

In Which I Show Myself Some Mercy

But not too much, not enough
to be noticeable to fellow commuters

as I stand in the bus shelter reading
about a woman who lies down

on the quiet earth to lend a few
seconds of gratitude to the dirt,

the way it compresses its ancient self,
its already profoundly compressed

and contorted and torn up self
to accommodate her heels and calves,

weary hips, shoulders, her head
heavy as a stone, and I point it out

(to no one but me) reflexively
as luxury, this awareness of the world,

this calm, this time spent noticing
a thing as constant and plain as soil

while so many of us are running
through clouds of exhaust to get

to the next cloud of exhaust,
and because I am starting small,

I am microdosing mercy and usually
in places away from home, where

no one is likely to steal the stash
I have, I give myself the minute

it takes to remember: we don’t always
turn to the earth for comfort but

also its cold reminder: how furious
and stubborn hope can be, how good

it is at existing below ground, speaking
only in mushrooms for centuries

if it has to, bound in thorns or buried
under boulders or, yes, flattened

beneath the weeds and grass—hope is
no privilege, it is too inconvenient,

too irreverent, insistent as a hailstorm,
and so, as I step outside the bus shelter

pulling my hood up between me
and the downpour in order to leave

room for the woman who wears no coat,
I forgive myself, my chapped hands

and soggy shoes and reckless impulse
to survive at the expense of living,

my rush to call anything we need and take
a decadence, and this mercy is potent,

it is a quick deep inhale, it is tangerine
on a dry tongue, it is enough

to make me look up through the rain
on my glasses and know I’m seeing stars.

*

Abby E. Murray (she/they) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Her book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 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.