By Christopher Brean Murray
Featured Image: “Summer Figs” by Sherry Pollack Walker

Don’t read it aloud
at the harvest festival.
Never search for a curse word
in its index. Tell the helmsman
the whole thing’s symbolic
from the nickel in the chalice
to the pinecone beside
the Nile. If you travel
by train, see the image
on page 9. Never place a pear
in the volume’s vicinity.
Don’t walk your dog
on the eve of its release.
Know that its title
is a piece of underworld slang
spliced with a Serbian maxim.
Don’t read the passage set in Khartoum
unless you’ve put your house in order.
If you find a beetle in your drawer
switch one bookmark
for another. Blossoms
on your steps mean
your interpretations
are fruitful. A crash in the distance:
implications have been ignored.
Should you record your reactions
in a journal? If moonlight bathes
a steel bridge in April.
Will the story be made
into a film? Only when figs
write novels. Direct other questions
to the telescope’s designer.
Never shut the tome on a fly.

---

Christopher Brean Murray’s book, Black Observatory (Milkweed Editions), was chosen by Dana Levin as the winner of the 2022 Jake Adam York Prize and was included on the New York Public Library’s list of Best Books of 2023. His chapbook, The Fugitive Lands, is forthcoming from Gasher Press in 2025, and his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Quarterly West, and other journals. He lives in Houston.