Clockwise Cat Issue 40

"Doors without borders."
"The war on doors."
"Door of tomorrow's marrow."
"Door hiding in a keyhole."
"Door that hears your dreams boil"
"I'm crazy for you door but you're crazy,
crazy door that I adore."
I adore Jeffrey Cyphers Wright's poetry; it opens the doors to a new kind of
consciousness of vigorously vibrant tones.
Sheila E. Murphy’s Reporting Live From You Know Where
Meritage Press
By Marie C Lecrivain
My introduction to political poetry came with the Poets Against the War movement, back
in 2001, within weeks of 911. Since then, political poetry has been part of the
mainstream, with many anthologies and collections published every year. Reporting Live
From You Know Where, by author and poet, Sheila E. Murphy, is a chapbook length
hay(na)ku sequence of poems written after 45 was elected president. Winner of 2018
Hay(nu)ka Book Prize, it spans 65+ pages in a seamless and imagist narrative, but it also
goes beyond the polemics required for political poetry.
Reporting Live is written in the hay(na)ku style (a 21st century poetic form invented
by Eileen R. Tabios. It is a six-word tercet with the first line being one word, the second
line being two words, and the third line being three words - www.eileenrtabios.com).
Murphy’s distilled the vast gulf of rage and chaos that currently divides the United States
into a series of powerful, raw micro-moments the reader can immediately relate to, even
beyond the political context:
look at what
You have
destroyed
forgiveness
was never
the right reflex
Within Reporting Live, Murphy brings to light those issues 45’s base patently ignores:
sexual harassment and accountability (you claim inevitability/I should/know, sides/of