Tag: Insomnia Chronicles

Insomnia Chronicles LV by Erin Murphy

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Insomnia Chronicles LV

The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. The woman who wrote a popular children’s book about grief to help her own kids process the loss of their father was just convicted of murdering him. Even my phone objects to murder. It keeps autocorrecting to my last name. I never realized how much Murphy and murder have in common. I prefer the Irish pronunciation: Moor-fee and moor-der. Today is St. Patrick’s Day. Many Murphys were murdered in the Potato Famine. That seems almost quaint, doesn’t it? Death by vegetable. Now we use drones and Tomahawk missiles. We block oil supplies and collapse power grids. From the sky, Cuba is as dark as a coal miner’s lung. Meanwhile, I order Guinness mac & cheese from Instacart and watch the Oscars on DVR. Kate Hudson’s necklace cost $35M. Demi Moore looks like a bird after the Exxon Valdez spill. Only one presenter mentions Palestine. Only one letter stands between fiction and friction. “Grief Author Guilty of Poisoning Husband,” the headlines say. She’ll serve life without parole while other murderers clean up in stocks, crypto, and votes. Once upon a time we let this happen. Where are our convictions?

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Erin Murphy is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently Human Resources, Mother as Conjunction: Lyric Essays, and Fluent in Blue, winner of the 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award in Poetry. Swoon: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming in 2026. Website: www.erin-murphy.com

Two Poems by Erin Murphy

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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

Two Poems by Erin Murphy

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Insomnia Chronicles XXIII

The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. My husband swears that every time he looks at a clock, it’s a palindrome: 9:19 or 12:21. What are the odds, I wonder, and ask my phone How many times a day are palindromes? But before I type the last word, AutoComplete reveals the most common search is How many times a day are you supposed to poop? A digital clock has 44 palindrome times in a 24-hour period. About 3 percent of the 1,440 times in a day. Admit it—you want to know how often you should be pooping, don’t you? At least once every three days, but your mileage may vary. I squint at the red numbers on my bedside table: 5:38 AM. Not a palindrome. It’s Electoral College o’clock. Ha. I wonder if this sentence has ever been uttered before. Like Johnny Carson’s bit, “Phrases You’ll Never Hear.” My favorite: That’s the banjo player’s Porsche. I once had a student walk into my office her freshman year and say, “My dream is to become a technical writer”—a sentence I’d never heard before. I get teacher, novelist, librarian. One advisee wanted to be the editor of Random House, which seemed not so random. But no technical writers right out of the gate. I heard that the Space Shuttle Challenger crashed in part because of a technical communication error, something about politeness downplaying the potential O-ring dangers. I was in high school. They wheeled AV carts into classrooms so we could watch the first teacher launch into space. Suddenly there was a ball of fire and a Y of smoke against the sky. Mrs. Byrd scurried to turn off the TV and launched us to lunch, then home. Every generation has its Challenger. Every generation has its challenges, some version of routine, routine, routine, disaster, routine, routine, routine. A palindrome.

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Insomnia Chronicles XXVIII

The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. My phone says it’s 3° but feels like -2. I learned how to make the degree symbol. You press the 0 until a tiny porthole pops up. Go ahead, try it. I wonder when meteorologists replaced windchill with real feel. Such a cheesy full rhyme. The assonance was cooler IMO. I used to think FTW—For The Win—meant Fuck The World. My colleague just spent 29 hours flying back from a friend’s wedding in India. The air quality was above 500. Severe plus, they called it. Literally off the charts. Literally never means literally anymore. Literally. The wedding cost $20 million. Every guest had a private butler for the week. Fuck The World. At least 1.8 million Indians are unhoused. That’s the preferred term now: unhoused instead of homeless. It shifts the focus from the person to the system. But it still defines people by what they lack. Fuck The Word. The ceasefire feels as fragile as a premature baby in an abandoned hospital. Fuck The War. I got an email notice from an academic journal that tracks its readership. The 39th person just read my poem published three years ago. This should probably make me sad. 1.08 people per month. Or person—is 1.08 even plural? It’s a poem about the inhumane treatment of Mexican migrants. We are sending 10,000 troops to the border. And by “we” I mean “he.” Fuck The 90 Million Eligible Voters Who Sat Out The Election. Yes, I realize this ruins the acronym. Fuck Acronyms. Every now and then a gust shakes the windowpane above my bed. It sounds like a single coin rattling in a tin cup. One person. One person will cozy up in a fleece throw and click the link to a poem. What do we mean when we say enough?

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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