Friday’s New Verse News: 3 Poems Taking Recent Tragedies Personally
Erin Murphy — Ed Ryterband — Laura Apol
AFTERMATH
by Erin Murphy
"Children Under the Rubble" is a drawing by Mohammad Hayssam Kattaa.
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“After natural and man-made disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and explosions, victims may survive in voids that are formed naturally in collapsed structures.” —Science Direct
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First, look for voids: bathtubs, stairwells, ribcages of infant cribs, the clumsy geometry of cantilevers and lean-tos from collapsed roofs, gaps beneath desks where small bodies just yesterday learned to add and subtract. Next, make your own voids: slide flat bags between rubble to inflate makeshift rooms of dusty birthday balloons. Finally, chisel dates in your mind: one week, one month, one year since you packed a lunch satchel and walked your only child to school. This is when the void finds you.
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Erin Murphy’s latest book of poetry Human Resources is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. She is professor of English at Penn State Altoona and serves as Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review.
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SHOWING UP
by Ed Ryterband
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Tyre
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Now I cannot turn my eyes
the pile up so monstrous.
Black bodies lumps of coal
shoveled in a furnace of indifference.
Now a land to deconstruct
terrain of my white privilege
unexamined legacy presumed
justice, access, possibility.
Now I will concede
the wind’s been at my back
for years and centuries
no bondage, redlines, stop and frisk.
Now I’ll steer into the maelstrom
air thickened with our certainties
clouds of righteous indignation
amplify the howling
Now I do proclaim
I’ll never know the pain of my Black neighbors.
I declare I do believe them.
I will show up for them.
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Ed Ryterband is a psychologist, has been a standup comic and is now a poet and memoirist. His poems have been published in Paterson Literary Review, Two River Times, US1 Worksheets. He has three collections of poems published by Kelsay Books: Life On Cloud Eight (2019); Beyond Cloud Eight (2020); Rain Witness (2022). He’s working on a fourth collection Equanimity and a memoir about his immigrant parents Who They Were.
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HOW MANY MORE
by Laura Apol
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Author’s note: This poem was written in response to the first message that appeared on the MSU Rock and before the names of the students who were killed (Arielle Anderson, Brian Fraser, Alexandria Verner) had been released.
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Laura Apol is a faculty member at Michigan State University, where she teaches poetry, literature and women's studies. From 2019-2021 she served as the Lansing-area poet laureate.