Sarah Murphy is the author of 8 books; the most recent: Last Taxi to Nutmeg Mews (2009) is a Brooklyn childhood memoir in dramatic monologues, prose poems, one-liners and drawings. While holding an Arts Council England International Artists’ Fellowship in 2007, Murphy recorded live her 1st innovative sound art/Spoken Word CD: when bill danced the war—an hour length dramatic monologue, also performed in full throughout the UK and in Ottawa at First Women, First Voices. In 2008, Murphy received the Calgary Spoken Word Festival’s Golden Beret Award and in 2003 the Howard O’Hagan Award for her inter-media book: die tinkerbell die. Murphy has performed, published and shown widely in Canada, the UK, the US, Australia and Mexico and also instructed in art and creative writing—or a combination of the two—in Canada, Mexico and the UK. Of Choctaw, Irish, English, Hispanic and German heritage, Murphy has resided in the 3 largest countries of the North American continent and continues to write of all 3. She grew up in Brooklyn and now splits her time between Calgary, where she has resided for over 25 years, and the shores of Passamaquoddy Bay.

Motherfucker

///so why can’t you feel proprietorial about a word the way you can about a childhood neighbourhood get that it’s mine you can’t have it it’s mine feeling i get that time my friend leila calls me from brooklyn to tell me all about her excellent red hook adventure taking the water taxi named after my mother over to the giant new IKEA its first weekend in the neighbourhood where i skated and biked and teetertottered and learned to fight while my folks took me to bars down by the docks so even if most of the neighbourhood’s been gentrified gained those perky upbeat names cobble hill boerum hill carroll gardens carroll gardens annex the red hook border now miles away from the end of my old block still the few working docks do feel mine you can’t have it it’s mine mine so why can’t a word feel that same way too only i say to myself why can’t a motherfucking word because that’s the word

///motherfucker i’m feeling proprietorial that’s mine that’s mine about motherfucker it’s like brooklyn to me my part of brooklyn a motherfucking part of brooklyn you can’t lose to gentrification and i’ve known that motherfucking word a long time it seems forever even remember the day my dad he was a sailor told me how you could still get killed for saying it or for that matter mammyjammer in a southern port town bar a little like chinga a tu madre in mexico not that my fucked mother used it much she was more a cocksucker kind of person last time she deployed that word in my presence was on the swinging bridge in drumheller out here in alberta a couple of pubescent boys started jumping up and down to bounce the bridge they must have thought they’d entered the exorcist those moments later when that baritone voice came barreling out of that dowager humped body stop that you little cocksuckers

///with the word really mine still motherfucker motherfucker and the motherfucking
memories you just can’t gentrify like me on the six inch wide second story ledge of that
house i grew up in perched just that bit precariously a dozen feet or so above the garbage cans my fingers pushing up on the windowframe to begin opening when the person i’ve lent my key manages to arrive at least an hour late it must be two a.m. so i call down to her the words from that old joke the one about the drunk walks into a bank cocks his finger and says hold it all you motherstickers this is a fuck up then i go in through that second story window anyway because it’s easier than backing my way along the ledge but that’s not really the motherfucking memory you can’t gentrify

///or why i remember it the point is that memory dissolves into the next time i’m standing in front of that door without a key and no one home and i don’t go out on the ledge it’s raining and my front tooth is dying the result of a long before shorter fall off a fence and i’ve taken darvon and codeine as much shit as i can get my hands on to numb that pain so i’m not up for a motherfucking slippery pigeon shit covered six inch ledge so i find a phone and call one of my fucking mother’s motherfucking friends who i know has a key to come let me in and maybe that motherfucker’s the reason i pulled the knife on the guy who grabbed my butt only months later chased him around the central park zoo and for that matter have chased my own butt around the north american continent because how the motherfucking hell was i supposed to know that stoned the way i was that motherfucker was going to rape me in my own motherfucking mother’s motherfucking house and yes you motherstickers that’s the ungentrified memory that’s the fuck up.