An apartment with frescoes on the walls
that lean toward the light, lean toward naughty Roman,
sigh darkly over their birth in the prim pre-Renaissance instead.
They whisper to each other of the hardships of being
mere copies of copies, restored and restored again,
each time by cruder hands.
The apartment, saddled with inaccurate
purple velvet furniture and skinny beds
packed in as if for orphans
is attached to some chi chi hotel with flags out front
that clank against their poles and wave
to the bronzed pickpocket boys in the street
whose clever-eyed discernment is spent mostly on
which girls’ asses are ripe for a pinch.
The pope who built the palace,
now parsed out for foreigners and fornicators,
glides from room to room, to hotel lobby,
to check-in check-out counter, and, disillusioned,
wonders if this torment is the tail end of his
thousand year purgation for loving the woman
who burnt his bread often and shrieked at lesser maids.
-M.
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Published by M. Ashley
I am an essayist and poet. My work has been rejected by some of the finest journals in America. Fortunately, it also gets accepted from time to time and has appeared in equally fine journals such as Word Riot, Inlandia, Brew City Magazine, and SageWoman, among others.. In 2002, I won the Academy of American Poets Prize for Vanderbilt University.
For no good reason, I possess an unnecessarily dark humor which is why being third generation California Inland Empirian delights me so. My gods are weird. I once won $350 for writing a smartassed essay on “why the wise use of water is important in my daily life”. I am undoubtedly the Greek god Hermes’ special snowflake. I’m pretty sure I got into college via a series of fortuitous clerical errors.
When I had to grow up and get a real job, I decided against it and stayed a writer. I have worked many odd—and I mean odd—jobs to support my habit: PR writer for country music hopefuls, resume massager, WalMart fitting room attendant and switchboard operator, and telephone psychic, just to name a few.
I am also albino. That's why my psychic gifts are so strong. I traded in my pigment for magical foresight, because that's how it works. It gets all technical. Trust me. That's totally how it works.
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M. N. Ashley 