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.
Underage prostitutes walk past the costume shop in hundred degree heat One happily remembers to the other how she went as Cinderella in third grade
how the lace collar itched
how her hoop skirt got tangled as she crawled through her church’s lame haunted house
how a friendly churchman, the one who baptized her who was on excellent terms with her mother, lifted her out of the cardboard box Tunnel of Doom, took a long time to untangle her skirt, then commented how the itchy lace collar was pretty—
In one such re-birthed home off Elliston, a neo-beatnik coffee-beer-food joint spills red neon light into the street where dusky jazz from the “Backdeck” skitters with dead leaves down the cracked one-way blacktop— falls and rises with the daredevil sparrows that dive-bomb the al fresco eaters’ feet looking for renegade Tater Tots.
On a cloud of sweet clove cigarette smoke the hustle of something like multigenerational intellectualism floats over the noise while the silver-haired owner buses the tables himself, magnanimously, wearing jean shorts, white socks, and Jesus sandals, worn-through.
Unincorporated island— city corpus surrounds this dusty stump where no appendage grew, no sidewalks either. All negative space—all septic. Streetlights are rare.
Casual murders In the night, in its little triangular park occur by desert exposure, by gangs statistically impressive.
Twitching bodies in the weedy sand. Rigor mortis limbs, one tangled in a swing—seat and chain— one stretched for shelter of the sun-disfigured slides.
-M. Ashley
I have officially posted every day in April for NaPoWriMo! I’ve never completed it before. Thank you all for reading along. Onward and forward!
Your School of Music staff picture made you out to be so much uglier than you actually are so I couldn’t show my friends, so we couldn’t fan ourselves with our fangirl palms and drool together over you.
I couldn’t make them understand the dark-haired, fair-faced impetus for trotting a mile to class in the actual spiked Mary Janes that made de Sade himself blanch—
what pale, long-fingered hand moving half notes from here to there delectability made me choose the long sensuous skirt with the long sensuous slit, (oh mid 90’s rage!)
what high-toned atonal muscle, what used-to-be-high-school-outcast humor made me squeeze my thighs together surreptitiously between this-will-be-on-the-quiz cues.
Dr. Link—may I call you Stan— of course I may, I was also madly in love with every single silver button on your early spring black jacket.
It’s going to be over a hundred here this weekend so roaches have started coming up from under the slab. Great big ones of the outdoor variety looking for water and morsels of dog food.
It gives me nightmares of Oklahoma, of poverty, of you leaving empty syruped peach cans on the floor, open cereal boxes on the counter, making coffee anyway in a machine the water container of which was infested with molting nymphs.
You called them albino roaches, Fucker, and laughed and said I was your freakshow baby.
The base note has something to do with sunscreen—a fair haired girl’s most important piece of camping gear next to bug spray which is the sharp second layer of the scent. The whiff of stiff, chlorinated towels, unwashed and hot from the top of the waist-high chain link fence they were draped over to dry completes the first perfumer’s chord.
For nuance, a drop of happy sweat from happy children come to wash their hands and faces with pink powdered soap from lime green metal dispensers hung over shabby sinks on which daddy long legs perch each rolling their eight dull eyes at the rush and frivolity of the new generation.
“I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” -Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
I wonder if, when Eve came along, Adam was as much in wonder with her naked existence as he was with the plants and birds and butterflies and the approved fruits, because we all know he didn’t even think about the unapproved fruit until evil Eve came along.
I wonder if, the seed of evil and rebellion apparently already in her, she was jealous at first that Adam did look at her naked existence with the same sight he used for the trees and butterflies and approved fruit. She was nothing special, or, I should say, she was equally special and no woman wants to feel that. I know it would hurt my heart if a man looked at an orange with the same kind of wonderment he looked at me. I would probably take it as a comment on my cellulite. I doubt I shared that in common with Eve before the fall because I’m sure god didn’t create her with cellulite. Or maybe he did and cellulite is divine and the only thing that convinces us that it isn’t is the evil rottenness that came out of evil Eve doing her thing.
If she had only known that first bite would mean a world full of Adam for the rest of eternity, no longer as enchanted with the orange as he was with her body, but forever commenting on it and, “If I don’t look at the orange with lusty innocence any more, then what makes you think I want to look at your orange skin thighs?
It’s like we live a great distance apart and come to visit sometimes, but usually when the other is away. We walk around, touch the dust kindly, see we’ve both been busy breaking and stacking colored glass in the windowsills— methodical about hue and striation. This one is like a bear and this one a bird. This one is like a wave and this one a glacier. This one is sunlight. This one is also sunlight.
How are you? I’m embarrassed it’s been so long. I know there has been so much and I care very much. I hope you know.
When my grandmother knew she was dying she picked out an opal for me, had a ring designed and sized it, for the short time being, for her own hand. I was an infant then, recently diagnosed lifelong colorless and could-be blind.
My grandmother was a force— a farm girl who took beatings for sneaking away to read, a young woman who left her family to work among foul mouthed boys at the Pentagon during WWII, a single mother, a stone wall, razor tongue, acid wit, first female management at the FAA.
She held me at the hospital in a hallway while the final diagnosis was pronounced to my parents in a tiny, sterile room. Her breast was warm, though the breathing behind it was labored. Her embrace was soothing though her hands were not soft from folding crust-cut sandwiches in wax paper for her children or grandchildren’s outings of uncomplicated youth.
She explored my hot face and closed eyelids with her wise yet diminishing fingers, the opal slipping forward and upside down under her nearly exposed knuckle, resting against my forehead, cooling a spot just above my eyes. She leaned forward and blessed me, “My dear little Michelle-y, I do hope you can see.”
She sheds herself one rough skin at a time, drops them dripping into the hamper, and, naked innards walking, drags the dripping hamper to a sly-smiled laundress who has her discount ticket pre-filled.
“Heavy duty cycle,” she says, “and remember, hang is the only way to dry.”
M. N. Ashley 