The News, and: Should I Get Involved?

Murphy 21 Kay Murphy The News A friend has just called to ask my opinion on buying a gun. Her dog has just died. Her windowsills have crowbar marks from six unsuccessful break-ins. She reports to me—who does not read the papers, who does not listen to the news for this very reason—that a woman, having had a fight with her live-in boy friend, takes a walk two blocks from my house where men in a marked car, the blue light rotating like a cheap stripper in the windshield, stop, pull a gun, and take turns on her for the rest of the night. I want you to be safe I say, Guns are not safe, and return to my desk by the front window. The curtains are open. My cat and an old cactus sit on the sill. Outside the shrubs sprout crowbars. Inside, books and papers, marked and unmarked, lie in wait. The paper remains white and blank as that of a terrorized woman's eyes. Nothing I think forms an idea as if the last one were undone in the back seat of a car. Nothing I feel can be put into words. As if everything has been spoken between the legs. A shadow passes over like a closing lid. When it opens something hits me between the eyes, bores a third eye where sometimes two were too many. It is like the blue fake light spinning, as if my brown eyes were shocked blue, blue as a fight with a lover, blue as a walk in dusk, blue as a bruised vagina. This is it I think, this ejaculation of images fucking this woman in my head, refusing to release us in the morning. Come over. Come over, please, with the news wrapped around your new blue gun. Should I Get Involved? after Ana Mendieta #4: Silueta I just step outside and know something is wrong. The body of a woman with one leg missing but appearing to be bent under her buttocks floats in a puddle of water. But it hasn't rained. Reflections of milky clouds coagulate around her. In the sky, not a mar. No, the only imperfection certainly is down here, not four feet from where I stand holding my briefcase . No use thinking about going to work now. Perhaps I should call the police. I deposit my briefcase in the front seat of my car, I bend over 22 the minnesota review the body, see that she has a star embedded (I'm no physiologist) where her spleen should be. Her breasts seem more than perfect, like anything beautiful, ageless, erected like mounds of sand along a deserted beach, drawn to some invisible message from the sky. Yes, in my present position of bending over the body, they are pointing towards me. I don't think accusingly. Now I have the distinct feeling of some tremendous weight hanging over me, that somehow the body and I have changed places. Ah, what about the police? Her face is blurred, indistinct, her arms, missing or hiding something behind her back. The star is clearly a wound of some sort, perhaps from a knife, cut this way, then that way. I notice my neck is getting stiff, that the police for once have an excuse for not arriving, that I am looking up. A rent in the sky, caused by the possibility of the knife, allows whatever is beyond what we usually see, to start falling through: this body of earth. Is she descending? And if so, by her own free will? I have no artful perspective on her destination but the star/wound has blossomed into flower. ...