Murmur Hours, by Ursula Zia

Prose, chapbook, 24 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Murmur Hours meditates on surface commotions that occur when a ‘woman’ perceives gaps in an interior world. The poems consider how a body can be a prophet alongside the arbitrary circumstances that crystallize the corporeal experience. These murmurations center around a character shaken between memories and the present moment, casting ripples upon the membrane of corporeal belonging. We are more than our physical body. This is a call against apathy.

Through antinarrative, Murmur Hours’outlines an urgency to empty every cage as a step to achieve an inner peace. The eleven poems were originally written on a typewriter as a means to uncover the source of a deep disquieting restlessness. Once the author came out as non-binary, it all made sense.

Murmur Hours considers a personal relationship to freedom of mobility. Not just as an accessibility to travel as one pleases, but as the freedom to access an ancestral memory and to interact with a social landscape and personal relationships associated with past trauma. The narrator questions their ability to reflect as they live in an increasingly unstable world. At times perceiving their existence as entrapment, they recognize a self split by a socially constructed binary.

Wounded and healed by the collision of what is human and what is nature, these poems address the tumultuous process of creation and destruction through observations of interiority and externality. The colliding shards of gender and the perceived body create a fluctuating interiority that passes between memory, and the present. Upon realizing the fragility of the body-vessel, items fall off shelves, prayers are cast to mechanical angels, barbed wire is bent, we consider spontaneous combustion and inevitably decide to eat god.

Ursula Zia (they/them) is a Pakistani-American artist and writer living nomadically. They were born in Atlanta, GA, grew up in Burlington, VT, and went to school in Worcester, MA. They are inspired by biophilic interactions, and the imagery of the lullaby to evoke a collective dreaming. Their work has been shown/published in the Hawthorne Review, The Hoyt poetry contest, ArtsWorcester, ALOCACIA, The Next Chapter. You can find their zines in little free libraries across the country.