Sample Poems by Erin Murphy

Hula Dancer

She will dislocate her hips. Or maybe they're already dislocated, a kind of double-jointedness, like the suburban girls back East who wrap their heels behind heads in slumber party stunts. There is fury in her rhythm, her belly a dark blur beneath coconut c-cups. More than once a drunk man in an airport aloha shirt has slipped a hotel key in the cinched waist of her grass skirt, slurring a room number in her ear. She drops the keys in the trash with the paper plates from this nightly luau staged by a fair-skinned businessman from Chicago. After the show, she'll change into a tank top and low-rise jeans with a red thong peeking up in back. She'll board the number 8 bus--named, after a decade of island time planning, simply The Bus--and listen to Ludacris on her iPod as she makes her way inland to neighborhoods where laundry stretches across apartment balconies. On Monday, her night off, she'll sit with a bottle of Sunny Delight under a line of dishtowels and her father's boxers as the wind picks up, lifting the clothes, bending the palms. And in between the buildings, pulsing low and steady, she'll see the real sun, Victoria's Secret red, right where it belongs.

Crossing Juniata Creek

The man's face is chiseled
like the chimney rocks

in the distant Alleghenies.
He leans over the tow bridge,

feeding, you assume, the ducks below.
You love the way he bows to nature,

makes a small offering to the place
that will accept him soon enough.

Closer still, you see he's tossed
not breadcrumbs but the top

of an ice cream cup into the creek.
The paper raft, round and thin,

drifts along on the current
without a Huck or a Jim, without

a hint that littering is a sin.
The man licks a plastic spoon,

meets your eyes, nods his head.
What else have you misread?

Blue

Spring splits open like an egg
and the sky is so blue...so blue
the Democrats claim it as a 51st state,
a joke that would surely make Debbie laugh

if she weren't dying. Debbie, my neighbor
who cried when Clinton left office--
cried tears of joy, I later learned--
lies in a shaded room that smells

of mentholated applesauce.
In the hospital parking lot, sunlight
christens every windshield.
Debbie, meanwhile, nods off

and off, morphine taming the pain.
Death cannot wait for rain.

Given a Shot

"The 17-year-old senior, who is autistic and usually sits on the bench in a white shirt and black tie, put on a uniform and entered the game..."

--Associated Press

The boy's first shot missed the basket
by a time zone; so did shot number two.

But then he hit his groove: 3-pointer after 3-pointer
and a 2-pointer with his toe on the line--20 points

in four minutes, a school-record tie.
In back-to-back broadcasts, the evening news

showed the shaky amateur video, so popular
it trumped a segment on a centenarian CEO.

Admit it: you'd watch it, too. But you settle for
re-reading these lines: 20 points in four minutes,

20 points in four minutes, play, rewind,
play, rewind. How we love dormant brilliance,

the perfect sapphire dulled by time. If only someone
would lift us up, polish us, see us. See us shine.