Dennis Menace
Before the alien bursts through the rib cage
to greet the world, a wolf or bear
escapes through or prowls a forest.
After a stranger pokes a head above bi-ped shoulders,
humans from town and country breathe easier
and welcome the newcomer to a table.
Between the wild and the caesarian section
performed from inside, the death match contestants
negotiate the birth and new born.
Guilt pummels the groin,
and longing kicks the stuffing from the brow.
Until an uncle chooses to eat paws and snout
before waking each morning, humility in shiny shoes
stalks and rampages a neighborhood.
About Rich Murphy:
Credits include the 2008 Gival Press Poetry Award for my book-length manuscript “Voyeur;” a first book The Apple in the Monkey Tree; chapbooks Great Grandfather, Family Secret by, Hunting and Pecking, and Phoems for Mobile Vices; poems in Rolling Stone, Poetry, Grand Street, Trespass, New Letters, Pank, Segue, Big Bridge, Pemmican, foam:e, and Confrontation; and essays in The International Journal of the Humanities, Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics Poetry / Literature and Culture, Fringe, and Journal of Ecocriticism. He lives in Marblehead, MA and teach writing at VCU.
Gunter Grass’ Ingredient
Peeling memory requires a box of tissues or a sink
to record the event for other body parts beyond
the cheek and nose. The sharp fumes
of ever-more focused lenses slice
through the present moment’s membrane
and nick the retina of who one thinks one is.
The bull’s eye of now had nearly
from the display selves gathered all the items
on the shopping list when an immaturity
knocked the day out of hand.
The chance associations that reach back simply
for years to come to show off the data bank
of photographic reassurance spice up
any stew brewing flat as a pancake flavor:
a person of resemblance stuffs embarrassments
and loss’s act one into legs and chest
in front of the camera. Too, too leaks
from toes of shoes. Into the twenty-first century
whole nations fill towels with regret, a pinch
of the German banquet chef who, wringing raw hands
and wearing pearls of sweat, washes down
reflection’s meal with salt water.
Sartre’s Virtual Vomit
If the day doesn’t begin with nausea’s
businessman belly sitting between objects
and their social agreements, believer bad faith
clears land for development. Absurdity’s
disorientation fills a mug at sunrise and focuses
eyes over and over on the mystery. Morning
sickness impregnates the senses, each sublime’s
detective. The priests of the money making
process loot the common myths from the trash
heaps and use them to vault collections. With
the takers’ hands on the controls, the losers’
revenge ritual drums fingers in courtrooms
and presses palms around a bible. The good
luck charm wears holes in a pants’ knees.
Naming each thing new every time it is spoken,
one lives an awe-filled honesty. Dressing
surroundings in labels, a person builds comfort.
A family seeing its kind in a world tames with chair
and lip until habit yawns and swallows the clan.
Stomachs want to know where heads are at dawn.
Kafka’s Bride
Turning the pages of books into streets
and corridors, the starving Theseus winds
to where the bureaucratic Minotaur
awaits each reader. Lost in a bad dream’s
penitentiary, a beetle-shelled scapegoat
recognizes his wandering a penitentiary’s
mad scheme and leads the protagonist’s call
for human responsibility. Estranged
from the guards and prisoners, the accused
artist on both sides of the ink hungers
for a balanced family, a woman’s touch
on any scale. Instead, the engaged lover
of life gives it up for a freedom just
beyond suffering father’s suffocation.
Rich Murphy was born in Lynn, Massachusetts. Credits include a book of poems The Apple in the Monkey Tree by Codhill Press; chapbooks Great Grandfather by Pudding House Publications, Family Secret by Finishing Line Press, and Hunting and Pecking by Ahadada Press; poems in Rolling Stone, Poetry, Grand Street, Trespass, Feile-Festa, New Letters, Pank, Segue, Big Bridge, Pemmican, foam:e, and Confrontation; and essays in Fulcrum, The International Journal of the Humanities, Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics Poetry / Literature and Culture, Fringe, Big Toe Review, and up-coming in Journal of Ecocriticism. Derek Walcott has remarked for the cover of his book The Apple in the Monkey Tree: “Mr. Murphy is a very careful craftsman in his work, a patient and testing intelligence, one of those writers who knows precisely what he wants his style to achieve. His poetry is quiet but packed, carefully wrought, not surrealistically wild, and its range not limited but deliberately narrow. It takes aim.” He now teaches writing at VCU.
