Cautious, crossing the parking lotthey pause and mechanically scan,their slow necks like a sigmoid functionsloping above the axis of time.Gently, they print their trinitiesin last night’s snowbowing their small headsby the white glare of the steeple.Why this daily pilgrimageI watch from the kitchen window?Why do the young trust this pathand the old hew so closely to it?Why does the flock follow that oneespecially, who fans himself sotheatrically, his wings risen like robesof the Pope, palms to a dome, as he gobblessome glossolalia off the brickuntil he’s blue in the face?I open the window and the head honchoskitters past and up, to find a perch among pine.How quickly he deserts the others,who, shrieking, have already lost the way.
Turkeys & Church
Dan Murphy
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From Estate Sale, published by the University of Utah Press.
A former tradesman, Dan Murphy teaches at Waring School and Boston University. He served as Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Academy Andover and was named a Grace Abernethy Scholar of Creative Writing at Emory University and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow at Boston University. His work has appeared in numerous journals nationally and internationally, and his debut collection Estate Sale (University of Utah Press, 2025) won the 2024 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, two daughters, and their dogs.
Winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry
In a house full of stanzas found in Estate Sale, Dan Murphy opens the door on the objects of his life: accumulated experience and imagination, trauma, personal and political history, inheritances that subtly unearth the forces of the world. Loss becomes a possession, language an act of reclamation, and form appears as the wearing of a dead man’s clothes. One poem reminds us “that things exist, even when out of sight.” In these poems, meaning is found, then, in the search for meaning, refuge in the search for refuge.
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