Christopher Brean Murray
Bad Boats
—after Laura Jensen
The bad boats have courage
the good boats never will.
They dive headfirst into swells
almost desiring the sea floor.
Trouble may arrive & drown
their ropes & drench their sails
until an admiral screams:
“Bad boats betwixt the thrush
& penumbra, beware night’s
razory reef!” The bad boats
don’t care. They’ll go anywhere
in search of flute notes
from port towns polished
with fractured moonlight.
They swagger & sway. They’re
neither daisies nor plumes. They
shatter anterooms & savor echoes
from the hangar where the painter
flings pigments in a trance.
Anchorless, they dance.
Christopher Brean Murray reads “Bad Boats”
Christopher Brean Murray’s book, Black Observatory (Milkweed Editions), was chosen by Dana Levin as the winner of the 2022 Jake Adam York Prize and was listed by The New York Public Library as one of the Best Books of 2023. Murray served as online poetry editor of Gulf Coast, and his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Quarterly West, and other journals. He lives in Houston, TX.