You Break It, You Bought It: A Villain-elle by Erin Murphy

You Break It, You Bought It: A Villain-elle

       January 2025

Our nation’s fate is a retail rule—
You break it, you bought it.
But the metaphor is broken, too.

They is what we mean by you.
It’s the it that’s slippery as a fish.
Our nation’s fate is a retail rule.

Is the it the country they overthrew
or the people, splintered and split?
The metaphor is broken, too.

Capitol, capital—a free market coup,
human rights sold to the highest bid.
Our nation’s fate is a retail rule.

A poet said it so it must be true:
The record keepers are the poets.
Unless the metaphor is broken, too.

When it’s life & death, not Family Feud,
who’ll be left to write the obit?
Our nation’s fate is a retail rule.
And the metaphor is broken, too.

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Erin Murphy is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Fluent in Blue (Grayson Books, 2024) and Human Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry). Her recent work has appeared in Ecotone, Rattle, North American Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Best of Brevity, Best Microfiction 2024, and in anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, Bedford/St. Martin’s, and other presses. Her awards include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, two Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence, and a Best of the Net award. She serves as poetry editor of The Summerset Review and professor of English at Penn State Altoona. Website: www.erin-murphy.com