Abby E. Murray

January 1, 2024

“The New Year Makes a Request” by Abby E. MurrayPosted by

Abby E. Murray

THE NEW YEAR MAKES A REQUEST

It wants us to stop wishing for peace
like it’s the one guarding some goldmine
of surrender or compassion, like the act
 
of not killing each other really is
as easy as pouring tea into mugs,
like it’s something we could have had
 
years ago if we needed it enough
to get up and make it ourselves.
The new year is broke. The new year
 
wants us to put dinner on the table
for once, wants to arrive in January
without pouring a drink for anybody,
 
wants us to rub its swollen feet,
and while we’re at it, stop drawing it
as a baby, too. Can’t we tell how old it is,
 
how it’s been growing for ages
the way we give it no choice but to do,
its face withered as the leather of believing
 
that wishes are akin to changing?
The new year is tossing our demands
out the window like laundry, and here we are,
 
catching them like the birds they are not,
just a bunch of prayers as useful
as limp underpants and socks:
 
who will destroy the guns? the dictators?
the injustice? we shriek. Who will bring us
what we’re waiting for? and the new year
 
points to so much peace within reach of us
in the shape of rubble or sweat
or estrangement or disapproval or debt,
 
needing to be gathered, sorted, and kept.
Get it yourselves, the new year says,
and its voice is as clear as a mother’s.
 

—from Poets Respond
January 1, 2024

__________

Abby E. Murray: “This poem is what I feel my gut saying every time I wish for peace in the new year, especially this year, as it culminates in more war and uncertainty than last year. I imagine this new year as the mother of our future, listening to our prayers for peace that remain unfollowed by action. She wants us to get off our asses and make the peace we need ourselves.” (web)

Rattle Logo

September 3, 2023

“Supermoon” by Abby E. MurrayPosted by

Abby E. Murray

SUPERMOON

It doesn’t arrive so much as continue
to exist, this blue supermoon
exactly who she was just days before.
When she’s this bright though, I tell my daughter,
and this close, we give her another name, that’s all.
I want to add that human kindness
is like this: never really changing,
never gone. This week, she asked me
if it was worth it, growing up in a cruel world—
that’s the name she gave it, the name it earned. Cruel.
So we sat outside at night to wait
for something spectacular to prove itself.
We craned our necks like tourists in a cathedral,
expecting to see the tidy, timely face of God,
and all we got was a persuasion of clouds
so thick and cold we had to guess
where the moon might be glowing.
We had to point where the gloom was thinnest
and say there! as if it was only as extraordinary
as it was out of sight—for us, for now—
but it was happening, it was true,
for thousands of years in a row.
 

—from Poets Respond
September 3, 2023

__________

Abby E. Murray: “My nine-year-old recently asked me point-blank if it was worth it to grow up in “such a cruel world” and I really didn’t know how to answer. Her point was that the violence and grief of living today might be beyond overwhelming, but I couldn’t help also noting the profound impact of kindness on the same world. And who are we to say with certainty that a deeply humane commitment to one another isn’t as old as our willingness to destroy? Kindness may be nearby all the time, even if we can’t see it; Wednesday’s blue supermoon was the perfect vehicle for me to finally try answering my daughter’s question about all the energy it takes to keep going right now.” (web)

Rattle Logo

April 2, 2023

“Self-Portrait as Coriander Seed” by Abby E. MurrayPosted by

Abby E. Murray

SELF-PORTRAIT AS CORIANDER SEED

Specifically, one of many coriander seeds
in an envelope my daughter bought at Lidl
 
using a pinch of her birthday money, which
is to say she is only nine, has no income
 
nor any right to vote in a country where
the leading cause of death for kids her age
 
is a bullet made by and for voting adults.
This morning, the newspaper shows
 
how the round of an assault rifle blooms
immediately when planted in the body
 
of a child—my child, for example, or yours,
the bullet a bit like a seed except this kind
 
only grows an irreversible, merciless absence.
See how I wrote those words and survived,
 
how you read them and lived? You and I,
we just keep getting smaller, more hardened.
 
Whatever hope we have left is crouched
within us, waiting to germinate. Are we not
 
also children being taught to hide until
we’re told we’re safe and pretend to believe it?
 
My daughter is still young enough to love me
unabashedly, as she loves cilantro, sowing
 
one of her first independent dreams beneath
a scrap of dirt in the center of the yard because
 
I wasn’t there to veto the spot she chose:
a slight rise where the mower cuts lowest,
 
its blade slicing so deep that not even dandelions
have been able to sprout roots there till now.
 
And I’m telling you, I’ll mow around that place
forever if it lets those seeds rise up, unfurling
 
as slow and beloved as they like, I’ll let the grass
grow wild, and the tiny violets too.
 

—from Poets Respond
April 2, 2023

__________

Abby E. Murray: “I wrote this while sitting outside my daughter’s school, waiting to pick her up from engineering club where they learn to make balloon-powered cars and popsicle-stick catapults in a world armed with steel and fire. All the children killed at a school in Tennessee this week were the same age as her. That morning, the Washington Post offered in-depth coverage of ‘The Blast Effect,’ or what happens inside a child’s body when an AR-15 round pierces it, because it is considered ‘critical to public knowledge,’ and I suppose they’re right. We, as a public, are being ignored by government officials who do not care how many times a day we’re forced to imagine our own children dying, or worse, experience it. We are being shown how to picture it more vividly, how to maintain ourselves as part of the problem. My own hope can sometimes feel small as a dry kernel; my daughter’s hope, which is expansive and certain, is what might save it.” (web)

Rattle Logo

August 24, 2022

“A Note from Your Friendly Poetry Instructor” by Abby E. MurrayPosted by

Abby E. Murray

A NOTE FROM YOUR FRIENDLY POETRY INSTRUCTOR

You think you can’t write about a mud puddle?
YOU CAN WRITE ABOUT A MUD PUDDLE.
Whattaya think you can’t write about that puddle
for? Huh? You think people gonna say some shit?
Gonna call your poem trash? Gonna call you trash?
Say old water lying in the dirt is too boring for a
poem? WELL THEN HOW COME YOU CAN
SEE A BRIGHT YELLOW DAFFODIL SHINING
ALONE ACROSS ITS CALM-ASS SURFACE LIKE
A NEW PLANET RIGHT THERE IN THE DIRT?
HUH? HOW COME? IT’S A GODDAMN
MOMENT, THAT’S WHY. IT’S A REMINDER
OF HOW SMALL WE ALL ARE BUT ALSO
HOW LARGE AND IT’S 100% YOURS TO
REMEMBER SO I SAY YOU CAN WRITE IT.
When have you ever written a poem and somebody
said it was trash? Even thought about it being trash?
Huh? Whattaya mean they have? WELL FUCK
THEM! YOU THINK THOSE PIECES OF SHIT
ARE OUT DOING THE HARD WORK MAKING
POEMS WHEN THEY’RE TOO BUSY BLAB-
BING ABOUT YOURS? NO! YOU TELL THEM
TO SEE ME FOR A GODDAMN ATTITUDE
ADJUSTMENT OR SHUT THE FUCK UP. You
write that poem about the mud puddle AND your
tiny big luminous daffodil self and you share it
anyplace you please because nobody’s gonna say
shit unless they say IT’S A GODDAMN WONDER
YOU WROTE IT AND YOU KNOW WHY?
BECAUSE IT’S TRUE, THAT’S WHY.
 

—from Rattle #76, Summer 2022

__________

Abby E. Murray: “I write poetry because it is the only thing I have been able to take with me everywhere I’ve been sent. I also enjoy it. As Marvin Bell said, I write poems ‘because it feels so good.’” (web)

Rattle Logo

July 24, 2022

“Funny How” by Abby E. MurrayPosted by

Abby E. Murray

FUNNY HOW

When some Americans hear
about a man-made calamity
 
unfolding in Britain, it takes
a hot minute to remember
 
there is no such thing as
a country that is simultaneously
 
one sovereign nation
and your sophic mother:
 
older than you and, at one time,
so powerful you didn’t realize
 
she was human. For example,
on the morning after
 
Boris Johnson’s hair
became Prime Minister,
 
you opened the newspaper
like it was your front door
 
and you’d just heard
shave & a haircut
 
knocked into it at 3 AM
only to find your mom there,
 
drunk, puking violently
into the potted fern.
 
Had it been anyone else—
a neighbor, a friend,
 
even a stranger—
you would have known
 
how to act right away,
but because it was who it was,
 
you stood and stared,
uncomprehending.
 
It took a full year of following
British government proceedings
 
to recognize the same
carousel music that plays
 
in the U.S. Capitol, a tune
we’ve egotistically grown to think
 
originated in the States,
another invention
 
of our founding fathers,
our long dead brothers
 
whose courage compelled us
to test whether farts are flammable,
 
whose bravery urged us
to rollerblade off the roof
 
of the garage as soon as
we were allowed to play
 
unsupervised. Even now,
on our shared and ferociously
 
warming planet,
a heat we continue to kindle
 
while knowing it will consume us all
surprises me by turning up
 
in London, where it is unanticipated,
brutal, and the seeming fault
 
of a belligerent sun,
as if the disappointed parent
 
of my country as I know it
was still somehow above
 
climate change until now,
until my child mind
 
perceived her here
on the front page of the Times,
 
unable to work or get out of bed
for anything other than water.
 
The first time I saw
my own mother sweat,
 
I marveled at how she still
smelled only of lotion
 
and Calvin Klein Eternity,
as usual, her glow unlike
 
the pubescent body odor
I seemed to carry just by waking up
 
and living. It wasn’t until
my thirties that I began to tell
 
myself—sometimes out loud—
that my mother was capable
 
of the same recklessness I was
because I needed to believe it
 
in order to know independence,
needed to say it
 
to that part of me who,
no matter how old she gets,
 
still just rolls her eyes,
slams the door in my face.
 

—from Poets Respond
July 24, 2022

__________

Abby E. Murray: “I was talking to a friend the other night about how, whenever anything painful or sad happens on a national scale in Britain, there’s a part of me that is, for a fraction of a second, surprised—like I’ve grown to expect ineptitude and blatant disregard for humanity in the U.S., and seeing it in Britain is about as unsettling as seeing my mother drunk (which is, for the record, about as likely as me seeing the Queen herself show up at my house in the wee hours, blitzed). Even heat waves brought about by man-made climate change, which affect us all, are being spoken about as wholly unanticipated in Britain. So I’m kind of making fun of my sense of problematic surprise, even as I move to correct it.” (web)

Rattle Logo

February 8, 2022

“The Right to Joy” by Abby E. MurrayPosted by

Abby E. Murray

THE RIGHT TO JOY

It happened: I stepped
outside on a Tuesday
morning and, noticing
cloudlessness over the city,
the hydrangea happiness
of all that blue, I began
to doubt my delight,
suddenly aware of what
I turned away from
in order to turn toward
comfort. I called LeAnne,
thousands of miles away.
Just as I suspected: it was
raining where she was,
the sky dull as pencil lead,
the nights oozing past
on rivulets of fog.
Her last memory of a sunset
was two weeks old
and she was getting ready
to go for a walk anyway.
I hung up and refused
to enjoy the daylight
I hadn’t earned. I worked
in the basement
with the blinds drawn,
picking at my keyboard
like a starved chicken.
My fingers froze.
I couldn’t feel anything
I wrote. At lunch, I surfaced
in the kitchen to make
a sandwich and checked
the windows: the sky
was still there, brighter
now, emboldened even,
a blaze of sun
on the windowpane
like God peeping in
to laugh. Truly, the sky
above me was flawless
cerulean, not even airplanes
signing it in their fine script
as they floated up and down
the eastern seaboard.
I didn’t falter. I spent
a few more hours in the dark,
writing about greyness.
LeAnne called and asked
if I’d read the article about
the photographer who
found polar bears living
in an abandoned weather
station on a Russian island
in the Chukchi Sea:
a deserted village
of wooden buildings,
some half-collapsed, all
covered in rot and moss
and proof of a climate
dictated by storms and ice
and harshness, only
the broken windows
reveal less emptiness
than the photographer
or any of us expect:
massive polar bears
poke their faces over
the splintered sills to blink
at the camera, which is
attached to a drone
so as not to frighten them
too much, and I don’t speak
polar bear but in these photos
they seem to be saying
hello, this is ours now,
and I have to agree,
as I imagine the photographer
did, because I don’t think
anyone can disagree
with polar bears even
in pictures, even the ones
who seem pacified
and pleased, albeit by chance,
with their sudden luck,
which they must know
is theirs while they have it
because they have it
but not for always.
They are dying along
with the rest of us.
It isn’t fair or unfair.
A weather town was built
by humans for humans,
then claimed by bears
for the newly fortunate.
Since when have accidents
been just? Since when
does happiness choose
its beholder? The polar bears
curl up on their new porches
like they’re waiting
for a pie to cool.
They let the drone
do its thing. They let it leave.
I tell LeAnne I need
to get to the post office
before it closes and when
I open my front door
the afternoon is still
hanging on, still luminous
but goldening, more
bronze than blue now,
as if wizened, as if to say
I can take it or leave it,
this joy, this surprise gift,
this nectar of air I didn’t
grow or pay for but woke up
and found just the same,
as if to say it had only
one plan for its life
and that was to end
whether I savored it or not.

—from Poets Respond
February 8, 2022

__________

Abby E. Murray: “I was in the middle of writing about joy and who has the rights to it when it happens to them when I saw Dmitry Kokh’s photos of polar bears inhabiting the abandoned weather station/village on Kolyuchin, an island in the Chukchi Sea. They poke their heads out of the windows to get a look at the camera, which was mounted on a drone. They sniff the air. They sit on their bums in the grass. They curl up like dogs. Every time I see polar bears I think about how we are killing them, but damn, they look happy right now! My writing turned into this meditation on joy in the face of so many crises, even when it is gratitude for a blue sky in the midst of bomb cyclones, nor’easters, and climate change.” (web)

Rattle Logo

November 23, 2021

“How to Be Together” by Abby E. MurrayPosted by

Abby E. Murray

HOW TO BE TOGETHER

Ask a second grader.
Mine stood at the top
of the stairs, masked,
looking down at me
in the basement, masked,
unable to hold her,
my skin white-green
and slick with virus.
I am teaching her
how to be separate,
how not to hug me
until the doctor says.
When she told me
she missed my arms
so much her knees
wobbled, her eyes
were two wet pebbles
dropped in a gutter.
For what do pebbles
give thanks? How does
a gutter say grace?
I couldn’t even ask
these questions aloud,
so how she discovered
the answer is a mystery
to me: she ran outside,
around the house
to the basement window.
All I had to do was
open it, and that was,
in fact, all I could do.
She found two stones
in the yard, one smaller
than the other, both
of them rough and cold,
then hopped them toward
each other on the bricks
of the window ledge:
uno, dos, aquí. Here we are,
she said, this is you
and this is me, together.
Simple and exact.
People, you know you
are not a child anymore
when love shocks you.
I laid there, amazed
by how much light
two chunks of rock
could give, dazed
by the feast of blankets
glowing around me.
Each shallow breath
was a divine bite.
My daughter was
curled up with me
outside in the late
November sun,
which becomes a new
shade of gold even
on grey surfaces, even
when you think
those colors couldn’t
be further apart.

—from Poets Respond
November 23, 2021

__________

Abby E. Murray: “This is a poem of thanksgiving—maybe not so much in honor of the holiday as in celebration of people who know how to be together through a crisis. In my case, I’m thinking of my seven-year-old daughter. Although I’m vaccinated, I contracted Covid and it’s been brutal. I wrote this on a good day.” (web)

Rattle Logo