In/strum/ent
1.
I notice the word “strum” hiding in “instrument” and decide to see if they share a root. I search for the OED, but AutoCorrect changes it to Chloe.
2.
My husband’s first wife has a daughter named Chloe. What the hell, I Google my husband’s first wife and find a wedding notice and a quote in a parenting magazine. (She makes most of the decisions and her second husband, a doctor, usually goes along.)
3.
The Oxford English Dictionary, according to an online review, is recommended by 91% of readers. Are the other 9% objecting to English as the language of colonizers (legit) or opposed to words in general? Like, maybe they’d give air itself a 7 out of 10?
4.
I used “strum” in a poem once to describe a janitor jerking off in a parking lot:
Smitty, the night watchman
let us boarding school girls
smoke Virginia Slims
from dorm-room windows
as long as we bared our breasts…
Show Smitty some titty,
show Smitty some titty, a mantra
he grunted under a streetlamp,
one hand strumming below
the belt of his blue uniform.
5.
Do I plagiarize myself? Very well then I plagiarize myself.
6.
I once asked a fourth-grade class what word was hiding in “personification.” I was looking for the obvious – “person” – but a boy raised his hand and said “cat.” He was not wrong (“litotes,” a positive expressed through a negative). He was also most likely to become a poet.
7.
Another time, a kid on my son’s Little League team said, “You write poems? I know how to spell onomatopoeia: O-N-O-M-A-T-O-P-O-E-I-A.” I asked him if he knew what it meant, and he said, “Oh yeah, my uncle has a bad case of it.” I imagined his uncle walking around like Adam West with Tourette’s: Bam! Pow! Splat! Turns out he was confusing onomatopoeia with alopecia, a condition that causes hair loss.
8.
When I was twelve, my mother laughed when I vowed to marry a man who was a gourmet cook/masseur/guitarist. My husband makes a mean lasagna and rubs my shoulders without being asked, but he plays jazz piano, not guitar. We all have to make sacrifices, I like to joke.
9.
Remember the song “Killing Me Softly” made famous by Roberta Flack? The first line is “Strumming my pain with his fingers.” Wikipedia tells me a 20-year-old woman named Lori Lieberman wrote the song in 1971 (the year my husband married his first wife).
10.
My husband says there was little pain from their divorce. They were young, had no kids or joint property, and parted on friendly terms.
11.
Lori Lieberman was inspired by a Don McLean concert at the Troubadour in L.A.: “And there he was this young boy/ A stranger to my eyes.” I prefer the lower, slower Fugees version, a breathy Lauryn Hill stripping it down over a hip hop thrum.
12.
“Thrum,” I learn, is the root of strum, while “instrument” derives from the Anglo-Norman enstrument. So, no connection.
13.
One Christmas I walked into a record store—back when there were record stores—to buy an album for our daughter who is not named Chloe. “I can’t remember the name,” I told the shaggy salesclerk who’d been summoned from the stockroom. “But the reviewer described him as ‘Van Morrison singing through two blades of grass.’” Without missing a beat, he said, “David Gray, aisle eight.”
14.
“Strum (v.): to play carelessly or unskillfully.” You can almost hear the scorn in the lexicographer’s definition. Strumming is sloppy, unrefined—surely nothing worthwhile could come from such random, sweeping gestures of the thumb or mind.
Muscle Memory
Things that are overrated: downhill skiing, sold-out stadium concerts, New Year’s Eve. Sure, you love the adrenaline rush of Breckenridge. Seeing R.E.M. at the Garden changed your life. And you’ll never forget ringing in ’92 with your fellow grad students at Rafter’s, the sports bar with a pool table and dollar drafts. But face it: much of what we think we enjoy is someone else’s idea of pleasure.
***
Try to remember the last time you thought, “This is exactly what I want to be doing.” Or perhaps thought nothing at all because to do so would mean stepping outside of yourself, perching on a ledge above your life.
***
My cat always seeks my highest peak. If I’m lying on my side, she balances on my hip bone. When I’m standing, she scurries up to my shoulder. I understand the desire to survey your surroundings from the sky, all of the details of daily living fitting into neat squares like the patches of land you see from a plane.
***
I know a woman who learned to drive a manual transmission on the telephone. She sat on her parents’ 1960s sofa, and a high school friend talked her through the motions. Two gold brocade pillows on the floor were the clutch and gas pedal. A broom handle was the shifter. Timing and balance. Driving as theory. The first time she drove her dad’s Camaro, she looped through the neighborhood without stalling.
***
There is a narrow window for taking my new thyroid medication: four hours after and one hour before eating. My doctor suggests the middle of the night, but it makes me feel like I’ve had three cups of coffee. When is it best to feel hungry yet hyper, hollow but revved up like a muscle car?
***
I rented a house in London that came with a stick shift Volkswagen Polo. The other side of the car and road, the other hand changing gears, the other side of the ocean, the other side of my life where a house sitter gave my cat daily insulin injections.
***
I have 62,175 photos in the cloud. In one photo, my husband and I hold another phone showing a video chat with our daughter in New Zealand. She waves. It’s early tomorrow there. We wish her “Happy New Year” a day late.
***
We have self-driving cars. We have essays written by Artificial Intelligence. If I enter “skiing” and “cat” and “brocade,” will AI write these words? Or these?
***
To hold everything and nothing. This is what passes for faith.
Redacted Sex
his breath on her [XXXX]
her hand on his [XXXX]
[vowels]
she says I want [XXXX]
[vowels]
his tongue on her [XXXX]
[vowels] [vowels]
her mouth on his [XXXX]
[vowels] [vowels]
his [XXXX] in her [XXXX]
[vowels] [vowels]
her [XXXX] his [XXXX] her [XXXX] his [XXXX]
[vowels] [vowels] [vowels]
he is picturing [XXXX] in another bed
[vowels]
she is picturing [XXXX] in another bed
[vowels]
in another bed, [XXXX] is thinking of [XXXX]
his [XXXX] her [XXXX] his [XXXX] her [XXXX]
[vowels] [vowels] [vowels] [vowels]
she is thinking miasma sounds like [XXXX]
cis sounds like [XXXX]
his [XXXX] his [XXXX] their [XXXX]
he is thinking conjugated sounds like [XXXX]
angina sounds like [XXXX]
angina feels like [XXXX]
[XXXX] feels like angina
years ago he [XXXX]
[vowels]
years from now she [XXXX]
[vowels]
why is [XXXX]
[vowels]
[XXXX] is why
[vowels]
[XXXX] is thinking [XXXX]
outside the window
the sky is the color of [XXXX]
the [XXXX] is the color of sky
Erin Murphy’s poems and lyric essays have appeared in The Best of Brevity, The Cincinnati Review, Waxwing, The Georgia Review, Superstition Review, Guesthouse, North American Review, Memoir, and elsewhere. She is the author or editor of twelve books, including Creating Nonfiction (SUNY Press), winner of the anthology Gold Medal Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award. She serves as Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review and Professor of English at Penn State Altoona.
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