Summer 2021
By Erin Murphy
Everything is free, it seems: parking, treats for dogs
whose owners browse free-range brown
eggs. Last month scores of documents
were found in a nearby attic,
dry rotted and tattered. One offered
30 dollars for the capture of
a Negro man named Amos
with coarse trousers, a tolerable good
felt hat, buckled shoes, and scars
beneath both eyes. It’s not enough
that this street is now emblazoned
with the words Black Lives Matter.
Erin Murphy’s eighth book, Human Resources, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Normal School, Diode, Southern Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, The Normal School Poetry Prize, and a Best of the Net award. She is poetry editor of The Summerset Review and Professor of English at Penn State Altoona. Visit website at www.erin-murphy.com.
Photo credit: Fibonacci Blue via a Creative Commons license.
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