by Sheila E. Murphy

Fractions fracture, shift what we elect to think.
We tell ourselves that thinking spawns retrieving.

Merciful half loud birds litter the street with
punctuation that safekeeps our retrieving.

Posses of arithmetic advance toward
routine left right where we left it, retrieving

daylight that thresholds innocence, behold ferns,
accumulated drops of sun, retrieving

what we once believed the norm, whole lives stillborn
in locked lanes perpetually retrieving.

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About the Author:

Sheila E. Murphy. Murphy’s most recent books are Permission to Relax (BlazeVOX Books, 2023) October Sequence: Sections 1-51 (mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press, 2023), and Sostenuto (Luna Bisonte Prods (2023). Murphy received the Gertrude Stein Award for Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Murphy’s book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where (2018) won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland).

Her Wikipedia page can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Murphy