BIO
Rich Murphy’s poetry collections have won two national book awards: Gival Press Poetry Prize 2008 for Voyeur and in 2013 the Press Americana Poetry Prize for Americana. Asylum Seeker is the third in a trilogy out now (2018) Press Americana. First in the trilogy was Americana, Body Politic, the second, published by Prolific Press in January 2017. Murphy’s first book The Apple in the Monkey Tree was published in 2007 by Codhill Press. Chapbooks include Great Grandfather (Pudding House Press), Family Secret (Finishing Line Press), Hunting and Pecking (Ahadada Books), Poems for Mobile Vices (BlazeVox) and Paideia (Aldrich Press).
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Molecular Application Form
The cellmates, being and words,
negotiate and fist fight to win
a hand and a nervous system.
When a palm buckles up a pen
for a drive, when tactile fingertips
feel for identity and orientation,
movement and direction threaten
with crisis or blank horizons.
Where shape attempts expression,
the fetal cognition position
at the waking foists
upon the day black eyes
or contracts with sanity clauses.
Before the subway grate
swallows up the homeless prisoner
the domestic dispute erupts
to declare, first that a lump
in flesh equals a voice,
and then that the unexplainable
noise remains coherent
to organisms elsewhere.
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