Two Poems by Erin Murphy

Insomnia Chronicles I

The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. I listened to a poetry podcast in the shower yesterday. A guy was reading a poem. I pumped shampoo into my hand and lathered my hair. He was still reading. I rinsed and conditioned. Still reading. The speaker was a father whose daughter was leaving for college. The relationship was complicated. There was a boyfriend. There were horses. I decided to shave my legs for the first time in two months (three months?), scraped the razor along rows of hair like a lawnmower. He was still reading. Man, I thought, this is a long poem. A long-ass poem. A good poem, but still. I stepped onto the bathmat and dried off. Twenty minutes and he was still reading. And that’s when I realized I’d mistakenly played a fiction podcast. It was a story, not a poem. But everything about it seemed like a poem. The precision, the images. I once wrote a poem called “18-Year-Old Daughter as Runaway Horse.” It’s like the Cliff’s Notes version of his story. Six lines. A short poem. A short-ass poem. What’s the difference between poetry and prose? my students ask and ask. I pretend and pretend to know.

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Insomnia Chronicles XXV

The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. A solitary rain drop—pink!—on the tin trash can outside our window. And then: pinkpink…pishpishpishpish. Then: shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. What seems like the absence of sound is actually a thousand soloists singing the same song. My husband gave me a bone-colored mug that fits neatly in my palm. Every morning I fill it with hot tea and lift the rim to my lips. Day after day after month after year after years. What’s the difference between full of faith and faithful? What’s the difference between noise and sound? I think the loveliest word in the English language is shush. Imperative. Verb. Noun. Maybe we don’t learn how to swim—we learn how not to drown.

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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