Christopher Brean Murray
Winter 2025 | Poetry
Sentence Sequence
The lagoon reflected the kestrel’s trajectory.
Data clusters unraveled like fiddlehead ferns.
The surgeon slipped the vial in his pocket.
A piece of the galleon was found on the mountain.
The helicopter evaded the drone.
I shouldn’t have worn this turtleneck.
Plans were delivered to the marshal at dawn.
The cricket was stunned like an eye post-injection.
The menu began with a lament for quail.
The idea of the shell eclipsed the actual one.
Sleeper, is the tundra too sparse for your dreaming?
Cloud—windfalls arrive in your shadow.
The architect’s letter described the lost cello.
The ballad features an oak frisked by winds.
The tiger’s heart: blue as a berry
& heavy as a blood-soaked blanket.
Someone left some phlox on your step.
We encountered a lighthouse in hill country.
I was a child when the specter spoke.
Terns skimmed dunes.
May perused its pamphlet.
Kids chased moths through meadows.
Christopher Brean Murray’s book, Black Observatory (Milkweed Editions), was chosen by Dana Levin as the winner of the 2022 Jake Adam York Prize and was included on the New York Public Library's list of Best Books of 2023. Murray served as online poetry editor of Gulf Coast, and his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Quarterly West, and other journals. He lives in Houston, TX.