i.
What’s the sweet science
if not a series of experiments
where irresistible force meets
an immovable object?
But what if one object is moving
to meet something that won’t
be moved unless the force becomes,
finally, unable to resist?
What if, under the brightness
of all the lights in Caesar’s Palace,
a broken hand can’t break
a hard man’s head or heart?
ii.
Hearns’s hook was pure
physics, an electrical storm
that left minds rewired:
unplugged and lights out.
Hagler’s chin was not
unlike a mountain range,
requiring centuries of wind
to shift a centimeter.
iii.
Does the wave despair
when it throws itself
at the shore, then collapses
back into black depths?
Do the rocks rely on instinct,
or are they focused solely
on the forces that shape them,
made to endure everything?
Will the stars look down
in silence, ceaselessly in awe
of the ways Nature rages then rests,
content to have changed everything?
Sean Murphy has appeared on NPR's "All Things Considered" and been quoted in USA Today, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and AdAge. A long-time columnist for PopMatters, his work has also appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, The Good Men Project, Memoir Magazine, and others. His chapbook, The Blackened Blues, was published by Finishing Line Press in July, 2021. This Kind of Man, his first collection of short fiction, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and served as writer-in-residence of the Noepe Center at Martha's Vineyard. He’s Founding Director of 1455, a non-profit literary organization. To learn more, and read his published short fiction, poetry, and criticism, please visit seanmurphy.net and @bullmurph.
Zak Schafer is currently afloat on a 41-year-old sailboat, though he does not know how to sail. Tied to a transient dock in southeast Alaska, on nights of swell he wakes to moaning lines, needing to be loosened, coaxed back to sleep. Wander onto more of his work at zakschafer.com.