By Christopher Brean Murray
Featured Image: from “Check the Mail for Her Letter” by Amy Parrish

At the trail’s end, I glimpsed
a humming nook of activity.
It wasn’t metallic, yet it shined.
Not liquid, yet it sloshed
and gurgled. A squirrel approached it
and stood on hind legs
before darting away over needles.
It produced an intoxicating odor.
The sound it made was soothing
like a hand smoothing sanded wood.
Then the whole thing shook,
flickered, and morphed into a voice
formulating a bewildering sentence.
There were pauses, and in them
other voices arose, some critiquing
the primary one, others elaborating
on ideas only suggested by the initial oration.
I took no notes. I couldn’t keep up.
New voices had coiled around
my own interior monologue. I felt
like a blimp lost in a system of caves
delving deep into the earth
as a spotlight scans the walls
scrawled with bison and deer
and the visage of a hunter
whose concerns are divorced
from our own. Even those caves
filled with voices: inquisitive, morose,
plaintive, shrill, consoling, and dismissive.
Irate iterations and blanket condemnations
strove to eclipse terse pronouncements
of enduring wisdom. Infantile babbling
percolated amidst the gossip of fools.
One voice said, “Confess,” as if into
a well of wastrels. Another recited
terms and conditions without end.
The voices melded into an intolerable buzzing,
a mandala of jabber, an encyclopedia
of interruptions, an anthology of blog posts
scat-sung over the crimes of a distracted quintet.
Eventually, the noise dissipated. I wiped
the drool from my chin. The squirrel eyed me
from a branch. I’d somehow lost my watch.
I needed to go. I was late for a lecture.

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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.