Horse Blood
However determinate one’s genetic inheritance, it must still, as it were, be woven into the present, an activity that necessarily involves both receptivity to the specific shapes and textures of that present and a spontaneous creativity in adjusting oneself (and one’s inheritance) to those contours…that we speak of by the term “perception”.
-David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
The abject is an end of one kind of organism, meaning
we are birthed into the rhythm of human
until shocked into the pace of a flayed antelope seeking safety.
How this run from community undoes all dialectics.
Art loses value. Only speaks toward commodity.
We call this the near future or a parallel now.
A human on all fours
or injected with horse
blood. A beating heart beaten
backward taking vitality soaking the sun
red or ridding we.
Personages swell into disarticulation.
The shape of stratum then rounds into
an engorged timeline ;
it’s gritty with bits of fossil too
much death to contain it all. We
say take time to grieve to find
a creativity that erupts out from nothingness.
We suppose a nothingness always we say
sight will lead us without worry no
touch to lead us through “those contours”.
We call this growth really booming
out from the inherited forcing
everything into something ,
but what of entropy ?
Grossing your self out enough
to shock the system into change.
An antelope with thread and needle
cannot suture itself– withers.
Upending the Illusion of One
Borrowed Catharsis
The ground rips open &
I know this isn’t cosmopolitan
but it feels productive.
At dusk, I grow
as vibrations charge
& settle in my feet,
reaching roots
infused with
total chaos.
I shiver, then
the chasm
shifts.
Dirt falls
inward like
a fragment.
I borrow a neighbor’s
catharsis, craft a ball
of it-gets-better
suck it dry
hand it back.
It’s how I know
I’m alive.
I’m hungry &
my arms stay put
like wet tree leaves,
I glow briefly but
been boundless
too often unaware
of the heaviness
peace harbors.
I dim.
The sun’s down &
fog leaves me
all milky
slick &
functionless.
A corpse
A this-work-needs-grounding
A finger flinging dirt
Or my father’s
arms in water,
around me –
The quotidian is gross
like that. A sentence
working in tandem.
A winter cloud is grey
never pink
nor white.
Perfect strangers lay
against grass against
me in this thicket saying:
when you say, oh no division
you say, oh no division
say, oh no division
oh no division
no division
division
& if the voice
no longer heals you,
cradle the body.
m/ryan murphy lives in Brooklyn, NY via Mississippi. They were named a finalist for The Poetry Project’s 2018-19 Emerge–Surface–Be Fellowship. Some of their work exists in or is forthcoming from Entropy, The Felt, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Cosmonauts Avenue, and Bone Bouquet. The rest explores nonhuman rights, caesurae, queerness, and language’s existence beyond the confines of the page. Virtually friend them @mryanmurphy.
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