FLINTKNAPPING
When young, I connected arrowheads with intention. One I found was brown and showed dried blood in the form of another color along a carved appearing edge. Weighing more than one might think, the piece was poised to enter flight when sprung from a taut bow. I saved that flint in a drawer with socks and softer things. Quite apart from the idea of protection. I had no arrows, I had no bow. I liked to look at the arrowhead as if it glowed. Who made you? I wanted to know, but privately, as I walked across the snow.
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Sheila E. Murphy’s most recent books are Permission to Relax (BlazeVOX Books, 2023) October Sequence: Sections 1-51 (mOnocle-Lash Anti-Press, 2023), and Sostenuto (Luna Bisonte Prods (2023). Murphy is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for her book Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003). Murphy's book titled Reporting Live from You Know Where (2018) won the Hay(na)Ku Poetry Book Prize Competition from Meritage Press (U.S.A.) and xPress(ed) (Finland).