Devin Murphy
The graveyard crossed the street
the year of my father’s stroke.
The village knocked down the caretaker’s house
to make room for the newly dead.
I flew in and pushed him outside
in the wheelchair. We made morbid jokes
about the headstones sprouting roots
pushing under the road, tapping
on the crumbling foundation of his home
which will be for sale soon
a year
two years.
Years ago when he held me as a baby
in the this house
me crying all night like a machine
the boneyard must have meant so much less
but now
it buds
between us
in silence.
Devin Murphy‘s recent fiction appears in The Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, and The Missouri Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and New Stories From the Midwest, as well as many others. His poems have begun finding their way into print as well. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Bradley University.