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Carrie Murphy

I used to jam / to mariachi music on a tape I thrifted / in Truth or Consequences because isn't that / how you make a life outside the norm?


All My Turquoise

My closet full of scuffed cowgirl boots
& how I'll tell anyone who'll listen

about my soul's bright home in the desert,
how I kept turning my face again & again & again

to the sun, claiming my place whether I have
a place or whether I do not.

Look at these leggings as pants &
bangs cut by girls with zines

or altars to Guadalupe in their kitchens. I'd
never make a zine because they seem

too earnest in a 90s punk rock way that I can't
own at all because I was in elementary school

when Kurt Cobain put a bullet in his beautiful
mouth. But I'll take all the Guadalupe that a white girl

born in Baltimore can take. Give me a robe
of roses. Crown me with stars. I used to jam

to mariachi music on a tape I thrifted
in Truth or Consequences because isn't that

how you make a life outside the norm? With
horns & moustaches & glittery pants while you

waggle your butt dancing around the kitchen,
cooking the food that is not of your ancestors?

I'll appropriate your culture & call it cool. That's
not a metaphor. That's what I learned

& what I sucked into my body like vegan chia seed
pudding. It's an honor, you know, not a mockery because

look at all my Jewish hair that's not actually Jewish at all,
see my hamsa bracelet & all of the unironic opinions I gave about

circumcision in my Yiddish literature class.
That's the way to win friends & enemies.

When I speak of friends, I mean admirers. When
I speak of enemies, I mean cyber stalkers.

I'm the pinnacle of pinnacleism & I make the place.
I burrow out. I spread in. Move over.


Carrie Murphy is the author of the poetry collection PRETTY TILT (Keyhole Press, 2012) and the chapbook, MEET THE LAVENDERS (Birds of Lace, 2011). Her second full-length book, FAT DAISIES, is forthcoming in 2014 from Big Lucks Books. She received an MFA from New Mexico State University. Originally from Baltimore, MD, Carrie works as a teacher, freelance writer, and birth doula in Albuquerque, NM.