Poetry by Erin Murphy

      Rob Hurson CC




Insomnia Chronicles XII

The night is full of insomniacs Googling insomnia. At yesterday’s reading, the poet had memorized all of her poems. She never looked down at the page. I was sitting up front, and it felt too intimate, like when you’re about to kiss someone for the first time. A friend and her now-husband were on their eighth date when he said, exasperated, Are we going to bed or what? Decades later, that question remains their favorite foreplay. I haven’t memorized a single poem, my own or anyone else’s. The first and last thing I learned by heart was that McDonald’s ad: Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. Why do we say learned by heart? The summer I was seven, McDonald’s would call random people and offer a million dollars to anyone who could say the jingle in five seconds or less. We were renting a house in Goochland, Va. Goochland. Gooch Land. Land of Gooches! My father had been out of work for a year. My younger brother and I slept in the same room. Our bedtime story was the muffled last chapter of my parents’ marriage. Every day I sat by the phone and waited for McDonald’s to call, timing myself on the kitchen wall clock. Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese… Maybe it was only $1,000. Or even $100. I could Google it. Googleland. Google Land. Land of Googles! Whatever the prize, I was sure it would save us. We shared a phone line with another household. A party line, they called it. Sometimes I’d pick up the receiver and overhear two older ladies talking about their tomato plants or dresses in the Sears catalog. I’d cover my mouth so they couldn’t hear me breathe. Myrtle’s in the hospital. She’s got the sugar, you know. Her momma had it bad, too. Some party. Once there was chatting and then silence. Nothing. Just an empty pocket of air. One lady said Shh. I think someone’s listening. Long pause. Who’s there? We know you’re there. I scrambled to hang up. Learned by heart. As if we commit to memory only the things we love.






Insomnia Chronicles XV

The night is full of insomniacs Googling insomnia. If I had a theme song for my poetry, it would be “Just Dropped In” by Kenny Rogers and The First Edition in which he wonders about the condition of his condition. Kenny Rogers before he was Kenny Rogers. The year it came out, my parents drove across country, Connecticut to San Francisco. My mother shed her Pendleton blazer for a minidress like the one she’d elope in that June. Later she’d shed my father and his undiagnosed darkness. She’d shed. She’d shed she’d. “Just Dropped In” was supposedly Jim Hendrix’s favorite song. Possessive x’s are weird. Possessive exes are worse. My father was too depressed to be possessive. No one knew what condition his condition was in. Who knows what Hendrix said? You can make up anything after someone’s dead. Georgia O’Keefe’s favorite color was white. Muhammed Ali said Frazier was the greatest. Pope John Paul II loved skinny dipping in the Tyrrhenian Sea. My father. My father loved me.

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Erin Murphy’s work has appeared in such journals as Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Best of Brevity, Best Microfictions 2024, and anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, and Bedford/St. Martin's. She is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently Fluent in Blue (2024) and Human Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry). She is Professor of English at Penn State Altoona and poetry editor of The Summerset Review. 
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