DEV MURPHY, FEATURED IN THE OCEAN STATE REVIEW

Anything at All

A baby wraps its fingers
around my finger or around
my hair, a cat clutches a toy
bird to its chest, and I feel
within me a mournful
bloom, a bleed, of joy. If the stuff
clutched in the paw were
my fingers, my hair, each time,
I would attribute the bloom
to my being wanted by
something good, or trusted by
something new and pure.

But seeing a very tender creature
reach for anything, even air, or
a body hunted, elicits the bleed.
The small fist, practicing—it is with a reach
that a being asserts itself as being.

And to think one so small and small-seeming
could hold anything at all—but behind
those seedlike eyes there is a fervor: maybe
we are born knowing just what we deserve.

I have not desired
anything in months.

One of the worst parts of depression, to me, is not wanting anything and just moving like a numb slug through life. So “Anything at All” grew from watching my cat play during lockdown—a time when many if not all of us were sort of reevaluating everything and wondering where to go next. He’d be playing by himself or with me, and I’d feel that tenderness, that recognition of something heart-swellingly cute—but more than that, watching an animal or a baby, something you consider innocent and, sometimes, helpless, go about its life and reach for what it wants and needs can be life-affirming. It simultaneously feels like an honor, being able to watch another living soul move through life, especially in those moments when they reach out to you for support or love or whatever. But it’s also a bit sad, when you’re going through a sort of existential crisis or depression, because you think, “Right, I felt like this before. How do I feel like this again? How do I remember how to play, how to want things, how to need things? I don’t even cry anymore.” So, the poem doesn’t really offer an answer and it’s not really supposed to (I don’t know what the answer is, anyway), but I think there’s something important in the ability to see another creature living life without being troubled by the things that are troubling you.

Dev Murphy is a writer, illustrator, perfumer, and editor based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is the author of I’m not I’m not I’m not a baby (Ethel Press 2023) , a collection of prose poems, abstract comics, and short essays about God, tiny animals, and loneliness. Her writing and illustrations have been featured in Diagram, The Cincinnati Review, ANMLY, The Guardian, and elsewhere.