an erasure created from the text of a July 3, 2021 Washington Post article on the planned demolition of the collapsed Champlain Towers condominium in Surfside, Florida
What is left is fragile.
Wind, rain, and fire
move faster. A cost
is coming to the coast—
flooding, wreckage, disaster.
Can we make revisions
to a month, a day,
a morning—collapse
time, the need to be
in motion? Hope,
memory, everyone
we know—that is
what’s left, what’s left
to implode.
This poem first appeared in Ecotone (2023).
—
Erin Murphy is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Fluent in Blue (Grayson Books, 2024) and Human Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry). Her work has appeared in Ecotone, EcoTheo Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Best of Brevity, Best Microfiction 2024, and anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, Bedford/St. Martin’s, and other presses. Her awards include a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, two Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, and a Best of the Net award. She is professor of English at Penn State Altoona and poetry editor of The Summerset Review. Website: www.erin-murphy.com
