Learning Out of Order
for Mary Ellen Pellington
Zanoskar was the professor’s name, teaching
yards of history with slant meaning.
Xenophobia would be shelved forever.
Whiteness, only half the equation.
Vellum calf-skinned volumes offered truth
under the guise of secular
temerity readily unlaced while
stapled to the text some uniquely
rigorous plainsong mellifluous un-
quaint worldly better weltanschauung.
Prompted or unprompted students thought
over offerings presented as
normative sprigs of philosophy,
modular yet complete with coupled
longitude and latitude ingrained, therefore
kaput went ignorance in one fell swoop.
Justice would be done then undone,
innuendo riding shotgun, windowing
hot-tempered looky-loos as would-be bold,
God-forsaken witless half-sensate creatures
fogged with dogma proclaiming antonyms of
effulgence, envy-laden creeps clotting
discovery in the classroom’s polished wood,
chaste with history, yet immune to
butter noodles soft with comfort countering
absolutes, quirky facsimiles of thought.
Drummer
He played drums, plural. I still hear the din
of cymbals sounding tin through the neighborhood.
The snare like soprano voice unchoiced
our sense of hearing as though no music
could slip between the hammering of bass drum
and tock marks of the wood block. His balance
of coordination punctured breathing room.
His garage echoed sudden bursts of counterpoint
mirroring mayhap what the founding fathers
had in mind when they scored the Constitution.
I don’t know what became of the drummer
who thrummed life sideways into our windows
zig zagging muscular punch lists
of percussion, the root of truest music.
What Makes You
What makes you think
You can caboose me into flinching
When you enunciate some bold
Unproven tug of wartime from
Your perch of idle entitlement
Disguised as authority with frazzled
Intellect in keeping with
Your keepsake collection stuffed in
The breakfront of your boilerplate
Game of keep away perfunctorily
Parlayed and splayed across
Your face facing the decisive dissonance
Ruling you out of place
Sheila E. Murphy. Appeared in Verse Daily, Fortnightly Review, Poetry, Hanging Loose, and others. Most recent book: Escritoire (Lavender Ink, 2025). Won the Gertrude Stein Poetry Award for Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Won the Hay(ha)ku Book Prize for Reporting Live From You Know Where (Meritage Press, 2018). She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.
Her Wikipedia page can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Murphy