Political Love Poem
for my political love: I wanted to get you
something apolitical, but all I could find
were roses and the socialist movement.
All I could find was chocolate and colonialism.
I wanted to give you something untouched
by human mistake and cruelty—no diamonds,
no flights to countries safer than this.
A friend suggested I offer you mathematics,
the objective truth of numbers. Did you know
Pythagoras was murdered? Did you know
Einstein discovered refuge in New Jersey?
Is there even such thing as harmless small talk?
If there was, I’d buy a coat made of its fur for you,
each hair some creamy comment about the weather:
here is a blue sky, warmed by manmade drought.
Here is a mountain you can climb to see
just some of what’s been stolen. My love,
I’d give you nothing if it wasn’t also ruined,
if it wasn’t its own long history of lack. I’d put my hand
in yours, if only its bones and tendons
weren’t brought to you by so much more than devotion:
theft and injury, centuries of trespass,
the wallop of our humanity on a breakable earth.
*
To the Man Who Could Shoot Me and Get Away With It
When I first realized I was a pacifist—I was a teenager—
a great mentor I didn’t have at the time told me,
you should learn how to be hated by the ones you love most.
It wasn’t terrible advice. I might’ve held it in my mind
awkwardly, the way I hold my husband’s Kevlar now
when he hands it to me between deployments,
sorting through our basement, saying, here, hold this,
and because my instinct is to reach for what needs holding,
I do. Maybe getting away with what we do in this life
is the worst that could happen. Maybe to be furious is to love.
A friend recently asked me why I thought men
had so much power. I offered the only truth I had:
because they’ll kill their children for it. I grew up to become a poet
with pronouns in my bio. Pacifism is more labor-intensive than war.
A mentor I really did have once told me, a poem isn’t a poem
unless it’s hurting someone. I thought about how the sun
can’t love anything constantly without killing it, unless
what it loves can figure out how to shield itself,
how to be loved from the safety of millions of miles away.
The sun is probably just as interested in survival as the earth.
A now-dead man-poet once told his now-dead woman-student
to make every poem her last poem, like she hadn’t already,
like we aren’t all being shot at by systems constructed
just for him. I would like every worm I’ve ever stepped over
to go back underground and tell that dead man-poet
I am no longer writing my last poems. I can only write
beginnings. See, I’m ending this one with a seed
no bigger than the sound of your name being called
from another room. You stop to listen. Who was it, calling?
Is there something you can do? If you hear it again, you’ll answer.
*
Hearing Test
I sit in a booth with the single-button clicker
in my hand and think about whether my husband
would or would not get a kick out of this:
me, ears muffed, listening to an artificial man’s voice
tell me what to say, and I actually say it. Say cowboy.
Cowboy. Say airplane. Airplane. At no point
does the man ask me to name what I hear
around his voice: the sound of birds flying far away
from where I am, the sound of two eyes rolling,
the sound of the ocean if the ocean quit its storms
and married itself to carrying a man’s voice
across it on a precious shell. Say shift. Shift. Say take.
Take. Here’s an example: the men behind AI
want to answer my emails using my voice.
When I am asked to teach a workshop,
the men behind AI suggest I call myself definitely interested.
The only thing I am definitely interested in
is the location of my voice: my throat, my skull,
my hands. It cannot survive elsewhere.
The audiologist discovers a small rock garden
growing in each of my ear canals, which she describes
as petite, in a not-good way. My laugh is either
a gunshot or a car backfiring. Say hot dog. Hot dog.
Say mousetrap. Mousetrap. The fluid that should be
where my rock gardens are can, in some people,
become so salty it crystalizes, which explains why
solid ground feels like the surface of the ocean to me.
When I explain this to my mother, she brightens
and says, does this mean you are—what is it? a salty bitch?
Everything my mother knows about profanity
she has heard from me. I gaze at her and shine,
a star and its moon, a river learning to swim in the sea.
And even though I’m more of a dick
than a salty bitch, I hug her, tell her I’m proud of her,
and we listen to the sound of knowing
the noises our voices make have been heard.
*
Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their first book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, while their second book, Recovery Commands, won the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Prize and was released by Ex Ophidia Press in 2025. For now, they live in the Pacific Northwest and teach writing to military officers.