The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. I ask the waiter for a glass of cab—cabernet sauvignon—and he thinks I’ve ordered Tab, the original diet soda. Yes, I say, the 70s called and they want me back. Magenta can of Tab sweating in my hand. A dime to play “Boogie Oogie Oogie” on the Pizza Hut juke box. My body before cellulite, before being sliced open to extract two humans. I keep thinking I can type an address in my GPS and go back to the past where everyone will be just as I left them. Sue Ann next door discovering her husband is cheating. Carol across the street pulling up in the pink Cadillac she won selling Mary Kay cosmetics. My mother grumbling that Mary Kay is a Ponzi scheme, which always made me think of Fonzi from Happy Days and which is exactly what the current administration is calling Social Security. What if everything is a Ponzi scheme: 9-5 jobs and mortgages and religion and reproduction and monogamy. We do it and then convince 10 others who each convince 10 others and so on like the Breck shampoo ad. When we’re asked How are you? maybe we shouldn’t say fine, thank you or I’m holding up despite the collapse of democracy as we know it or, as my friend Hester likes to say, despite the WTFery. Maybe the real question is How are you here? You might trace it back to when your parents caught each other’s eye across the college student union or factory assembly line. You might think of the friend in junior high who called at 3 AM to say she’d swallowed a whole bottle of Tylenol and made you pinky swear you wouldn’t tell a soul. You woke your mother who called 9-1-1, and your friend missed a week of school and never talked to you again. How are you here? How are you here to see dogwood blossoms the color of Laffy Taffy? To watch the green-black night sky swirl like a giant mood ring. To write the word saccharin and for once mean soda, not sentimentality. To say this is why we can have nice things.
Erin Murphy is the author or editor of sixteen books, most recently Swoon: New and Selected Poems,Human Resources, Mother as Conjunction: Lyric Essays, and Fluent in Blue, winner of the 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award in Poetry. She is poetry editor of The Summerset Review and professor of English at Penn State University where she has been named the 2026-27 Penn State Laureate. Website: www.erin-murphy.com