Three Poems by Jenna Murray
Art by Peter Dyllong
Dreaming of Gladiators
What really scared me? Not their eyes
moving through the war. Or their skin latexed
in metal. Not how they fought over who was
my father. Kept swinging rocks into throats.
Not how the birds that morning
woke us so senselessly, almost gargling across the sunlight.
After we loved and I told you the dream and you cried.
Not that I was so married to my grief
that I was creating problems with your desire.
But how they kept holding me
down to the ground. Remember how dark we felt?
Lying naked—fragile—momentary—
when you said I’m sorry you dreamt that and I said ditto.
It's not madness. Not grief that has built
the woman in me. Not the dying father. Not religion.
Not climbing out of my pain
like bees hollowing a comb. Not the tomb air I heaved into
when I finally reconciled the fathers silence.
But the boyfriends, the home videos of sex in the snow,
the clean oak music box I kept opening and closing.
I want to be desired in a way that takes me home.
Now tell me, what do you see
when you look under me? This touching.
Some sort of rapture. This seasick pulse.
Overdoses
My mother is most beautiful
when she is saying goodbye.
Is it wrong?
Five years ago
she rocked herself
above the hospital bed, ruminating,
muttering
I’d thought I lost another one,
her speech
so tied to my breathing,
her breathing
God of my speech—
I was dying
but I was desirable,
I was dying on her birthday.
Her face blurred
like a ladybug under a glass.
I chose the easy way out,
and without any mercy. My mother
drove in the snow to save me,
dinner canceled,
the whole family
sleeping in arm chairs around me
wrapped in sherpa.
I wanted to be desired enough
no one could forget me.
I wanted to be desired
so much that I woke in the middle of that day
surrounded by their limp bodies—
dozing in and out of sleep,
tongues hanging out past
their teeth
—and still could not feel loved.
Jenna Murray is a poet and educator based in New York City. Her poetry has appeared in Four Way Review, Poets.org, Zócalo Public Square, and other publications. She is the winner of the Catalina Páez & Seumas MacManus Award from The Academy of American Poets, the Collie Hoffman Prize, and the Thomas Hunter Fellowship from Hunter College, where she received her MFA.