The kind that gives life to kites
and sails. The kind you fight:
headwind on a highway, fuel
needle teetering toward empty.
The kind you want: tailwind,
an invisible nudge from behind,
from a mother long, long gone.

©

Erin Murphy’s eighth book of poems, Human Resources, is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her work has appeared in such journals as The Georgia Review, Field, Southern Humanities Review, Glass, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her awards include being longlisted for the National Poetry Society Prize (United Kingdom), The Normal School Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and a Best of the Net award. She is editor of three anthologies from the University of Nebraska Press and SUNY Press and serves as Poetry Editor of The Summerset Review. She is Professor of English at Penn State Altoona.