CHRISTINA MURPHY

Christina Murphy’s poetry is an exploration of consciousness as subjective experience, and her poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including, PANK, Dali’s Lovechild, and Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, and the anthologies From the Roaring Deep: A Devotional in Honor of Poseidon and the Spirits of the Sea, The Great Gatsby Anthology, Let the Sea Find Its Edges, and Remaking Moby-Dick. Her work has been nominated multiples times for the Pushcart Prize and for the Best of the Net anthology.

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A TOWN WHERE THE MERMAID by Christina Murphy
​
a town where the mermaid
is a run-down bar and fishing nets hang 
on wooden walls,

the sea nearby rocks
in fragmented lights;

the waves are reminders
of change and temporality— 
nothing lasts beyond small motions

not hearts or grains of sand, not even
stars someday when infinity is exhausted
and nothing remains to understand the silence

INTERSECTIONS by Christina Murphy

The order of things is the outer shell
of stems & roots, waterfalls & bedrock
opening into the softest sighs of patterns
shaped by the intersections of evening light 

The grains of ocean sand
are blossoming stairways,
narrowly extending into a way of being,
silently beautiful in all forms of light

Concealed in clouds are the tears of the lost,
the wrong turns, the sad choices—all hidden
within the white shadows floating, like delicate smoke,
across a deeply blue & motionless sky

ALL THINGS CONTAINED BY ZERO by Christina Murphy
​
1.
Hillsides in the blue haze of evening
where intricate honeysuckle vines frame
the melancholy of the sun’s diminishing heat

Rippled water shines in silken layers,
and all the world’s failings are revealed 
by the loneliness of each mooring of dreams in an endless sea

All things contained by zero will be reshaped  
by the meanings held in one fragile moment--
night’s darkness approaching like the shadows

Of moonlight on ancient waters, restless with currents
as the graceful arc of gravity connects land and sky
through a latticework of clouds and waves stirring

2.
In light, in darkness, the world does not seem a globe 
but a surface layered with growth and diminishment
and a circumference that defines what might have been

Like the stones on eroded shores that, in twilight,
look like angels seeking a way to speak to the heavens,
the indifference is cold and deep, more silent than foreboding

And only the tides—like blood—move through channels
and bow down to the fate that holds infinity in its scope
and reshapes the absence entwined within every moment