{"id":11862,"date":"2022-02-02T02:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-02T02:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=11862"},"modified":"2022-02-17T00:11:20","modified_gmt":"2022-02-17T00:11:20","slug":"once-youve-seen-a-bird-in-the-house-erin-murphy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/?p=11862","title":{"rendered":"ONCE YOU’VE SEEN A BIRD IN THE HOUSE – Erin Murphy"},"content":{"rendered":"

you can never not see a bird in your house.
\nEvery rustling paper, every curtain twisting
\n 
\nin a breeze, every shadow on a ceiling
\nis a frantic, fluttering bird. One winter we had
\n 
\nthree in three weeks. I came home to find
\nour typically docile calico in the kitchen
\n 
\nfeasting on a dead robin, her teeth bared,
\nface pasted with feathers. The house was sealed,
\n 
\nno obvious holes in the siding, windows,
\nor chimney, not like those buildings ripped open
\n 
\nby storms\u2014giant dollhouses dripping
\nwith insulation, beds and tables still in place,
\n 
\npaintings teetering over sofas. Don\u2019t get me
\nwrong\u2014I\u2019d never welcome destruction.
\n 
\nBut I like to glimpse the cross-section
\nof others\u2019 lives. On the other side of the rowhouse
\n 
\nwall we share with neighbors, we don\u2019t hear
\nvoices, but sometimes there\u2019s a low rumbling
\n 
\nthat would barely register a 1.0 on the conversation
\nRichter scale. Most mornings we hear their shower
\n 
\npulsing behind our bed. Less than a foot away
\na naked man is working his hair into a lather\u2014
\n 
\njust once, I\u2019m sure, because no one
\nbelieved those shampoo instructions telling us
\n 
\nto rinse and repeat, did they? When I was a child
\nwe always rented one Days Inn motel room
\n 
\nfor our family of four, and my parents hung a sheet
\nbetween their bed and ours, a makeshift partition.
\n 
\nI think this is true and not something I saw on TV.
\nOr maybe I just want to believe they liked each other
\n 
\nonce. There are a million years between is and was,
\nare and were. It\u2019s no accident that houses have stories.
\n 
\nOurs has a foundation made of blocks. Sometimes
\nlight squeezes through the cracks. Sometimes a bird.
\n 
\n 
\n\"\"Erin Murphy\u2019s latest book of poems, Human Resources<\/em>, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as The Normal School, Southern Poetry Review, Guesthouse, The Georgia Review, North American Review<\/em>, and Women\u2019s Studies Quarterly<\/em>. Her awards include The Normal School Poetry Prize judged by Nick Flynn, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and a Best of the Net award judged by Patricia Smith. She is editor of three anthologies from the University of Nebraska Press and SUNY Press and serves as Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review<\/em>. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State Altoona.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

you can never not see a bird in your house. Every rustling paper, every curtain twisting   in a breeze, every shadow on a ceiling is a frantic, fluttering bird. One winter we had   three in three weeks. I came home to find our typically docile calico in the kitchen   feasting on a [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11988,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[389,149],"class_list":["post-11862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry","tag-blue-egg-by-mouree013","tag-wikicommons"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11862"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12045,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11862\/revisions\/12045"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/narrativenortheast.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}