About the Author Pop is from a collection of poems title Voyeur by Rich Murphy on the subject of love in the wasteland, poems exploring love: lust, romance, and compassion. His Poems have appeared in such journals as Rolling Stone, Poetry Magazine, Grand Street, New Letters, Confrontation Magazine, Negative Capability, Vermont Literary Magazine, Slant Journal, Seattle Review, International Poetry Review, Montserrat Review, Connecticut Poetry Review, Icarus, Natural Bridge, Alligator Juniper, New Delta Review, and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review.

The storybook's pages popped out
into the rooms of the house where she
now lives. Every house on her street
was constructed in the same manner.

Small cities outside the neighborhood
sprang from Dante's Inferno. In the state
capital pinstriped men pass judgment:
Barbie dolls hanged from arms of husbands --

single mothers to the pitch of poverty.
To the west clitori are manicured
with seashells; to the east head strong
women bathe in acid. From the nightmares

waiting for dimension in the light of yet
another day, no children startle with hope
when authors become despots and fix
their pens around their subjects.