Skip to main content

Elisabeth Murawski

Author of MOON AND MERCURY (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 1990) and a chapbook, TROUBLED BY AN ANGEL (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1997), Elisabeth Murawski is a native of Chicago but has lived in the DC area since 1960. She works as a training specialist for the U.S. Census Bureau and has served as an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University Washington Center and the University of Virginia Falls Church Center. She has received four grants from The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, NM and a partial fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. Publications include: THE YALE REVIEW, THE DUBLINER, THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW, GRAND STREET, DOUBLETAKE, FIELD, THE LITERARY REVIEW, CRAZYHORSE, THE AMERICAN VOICE, AMERICAN POETRY REVIEW, POETRY NORTHWEST, THE OHIO REVIEW, SHENANDOAH, et al.

Author

Dirge

Water plays its cards. You will go under, but this is privileged information. Your eyes frozen in the lake glitter like sin. Mornings I wake wanting to descend and possess you, to be captured and strip-searched until nothing is lef [...]

Bazaar

I choose lavender to slay the Hindu's tongue, charming me to rise upon my coils, a secret flute. Money is the object fastened to our poverty of feeling. We kiss in pennies, nickels, dimes, scorning our eucharist— our sodden bread [...]

Hatteras Lighthouse

We laugh and pant for our hearts pushed this far, each step harder than the last, the air close and humid so that our hair clings to our necks and we gasp, forced to stop at landings on this spiral to a man-made moon. Each window leaks a draft of coo [...]

As I Grow Old

have come to know when to brush crumbs from his vest when to tighten the cummerbund the puppet movement of brother death in black and white evening suit he takes off his hat does that jerking bow of the ambassador s'il vous plait bone on bone clickin [...]

Dies Illa

It's modern, graveside, to shield the bereaved, postpone the final creak of straps till after the limos leave. Not so cremation's nascent protocol: mourners at the wall must bear the squeak of lazy iron fly crawling up marble, a digger in a jumpsuit [...]

After Sandburg

  The belly of the city swells with trains.Stitched in her side the stockyards' heartburncarbonates the river's throat. She lifts her foxy dunes,parades lakeside and stateside,whores a little in the board of trade. Her iron fingers pierce t [...]