Phobe Manifesto
Carrie Murphy
Here’s what I think about running a marathon:
Moving your body in one direction
for a really long time is just moving your body
in one direction for a really long time.
But I’ll ooh & ahh over anyone’s homegrown vegetables
or homesewn clothes or log cabin they built
with their admirably calloused hands.
I just don’t care about your sustained athleticism.
It’s not enough to have all the things or do all the things.
We have to show them to other people & look at their things, too.
Saying you’re humbled is basically the opposite of being humbled &
I’ll confess I’m ashamed by a lot of the mean things
in my brain. Like that certain people are just weird-looking,
no matter what, or that my boyfriend walks like a crab
or that I think you really should have tried harder
to breastfeed. But I’m scared to say mean things
in public even though all I do is say stuff from my computer
& get money for it,
pretending to stamp out the patriarchy by critiquing
Katy Perry & her boobs that have gone beyond
being costumed as cupcakes & are now
actual cupcakes.
The discourse of what to eat & how to eat & where to work
& how to work when I feel sloppy & spoiled
because I don’t want to wear pumps or get tenure
or eat macaroni from a box. But I want everyone else
to be able to do those things if they want to do them
so I write like a heart with spikes & I think my meanness deep
inside like a kitchen faucet that’ll cut your lip right off.
We’re iridescent, I tell myself, We’re multifaceted. I know you
are telling yourself this, too, at the beginning of every
frowning magenta afternoon opening a sad desk salad
or trying to get the digital word out about abortion.
Then we’re making dreamcatchers with strands of our own hair
or tooling a maze of a leather belt or chanting the names
of our future children like talismans on our tongues or imagining up
some dreamy opus where we’re constantly getting fucked
& smiling about it because there’s no male privilege
or vaginismus. Then we’re not. This is how the world ends:
not with a bomb or a sun that’s scorched
those melty ice caps but with an ovary
& an asterisk.
Or a sneaker
dipped in gold.
From Fat Daisies
Available from Big Lucks
Also available from Small Press Distribution
Carrie Murphy is the author of the poetry collections Fat Daisies (Big Lucks, 2015) and Pretty Tilt (Keyhole Press, 2012) as well as the chapbook, Meet the Lavenders (Birds of Lace, 2011). She received an MFA from New Mexico State University. Originally from Baltimore, MD, Carrie works as a teacher, freelance writer, and doula in Albuquerque, NM, where she is a member of the Dirt City Writers collective.
