This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from I’m not I’m not I’m not a baby by Dev Murphy (Ethel Zine & Micro Press 2024).
Lamb’s Ear
I think about what I would leave my children if I had any: lessons in self- comfort, habits to help them breathe, a prayer, a walk, picking up lamb’s ear by the side of the road. After a heavy rain the stalks bow down but when they dry they stand up again. I carry an ear in my fingers and stroke it as I walk. // Once as a child I heard the Lord say to me My frightened little lamb. Most of my beliefs have left me but I hold onto that. But how can you explain to a therapist who wants to know if you’ve ever heard the voice of someone who is not there that yes you have but this is different? When the therapist says, “So it was the result of sleep deprivation, desperation, sadness, loneliness,” I say, “I guess,” but what I’m really thinking is, How do you expect to help me if you don’t believe what I’m telling you? If we’re talking about life and death here, you should know that I don’t want to live in a world where I don’t now and then hear the voice of God.
Devan Murphy is the author of I’m not I’m not I’m not a baby (Ethel 2024), a collection of prose poems, short essays, and abstract comics about God and loneliness and love and animals. Her writing and illustrations have been featured or are forthcoming in Electric Literature, The Iowa Review, ANMLY, The Cincinnati Review, The Guardian, A Velvet Giant, and elsewhere. She lives in Pittsburgh.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, and Editor-in-Chief at beestung. They are an editor on the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
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