Category: Confessional Poetry

When You Think You’re Clean (poetry)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Taoists say there are 36,000
Goddesses and gods that reside in
The body. And they leave if
You don’t wash with the dawn because
They are disgusted. Sometimes
I am disgusted with my body to
Myself for all it has been touched and
Touched and spewed on so I
Don’t shower regularly enough unable to
Abide the touching of myself.

Or I remember the many times
My pimp almost drowned me in
A claw foot bathtub for some
Low earning insubordination and
How drowning makes your head feel
Huge and tight–a meat balloon ready
To burst meat and blood and
Offal all over the white tiled
Bathroom walls and it’s so
Hard to bathe regularly too.

But I wash my hands after I go
To the bathroom every time and
I hear all 36,000 goddesses and
Gods who have fled my filthy body to
My clean pink and pruny hands
Rejoice in the little cold baths
With honey soap and
A gentle toweling.

Personally I don’t think the goddesses and
Gods are so offended by human filth. I asked my favorite
God about it once and he
Agreed. He said, “You humans–
To a god, even when you think
You’re clean
You ain’t.”

Which is nice to know on days
When the ghosts of Johns and pimp
Make cleanliness in my eyes and
The 72,000 god eyes inside me
Next to impossible.

-M. Ashley

An Escaped Prostitute Prays to Her Mother (poetry)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

An Escaped Prostitute Prays to Her Mother
I lie on the grass
On the soft dark ground
Inhaling the breast smell of
My lush mother. I wonder
Mother is your body so dark and
Life-giving because my blood
Was once soaked into it?

I don’t want to write about tears but
I cried when my feet bled
Weakly
Trying to escape my bondage in the night
Scuffing over jagged pebbles hidden in
Your dark body my Mother.

I fell to my knees. My knees and
Palms bled too. Rich earth made
Richer and richer. My tears softening
The soil—a salt green growing things can use.

Tears and blood like fear sweat and breast
Milk and flowing water take the easy path.

I got free my Mother
Eventually.

And have come to lie down in the fertile
Place my body made with yours.

Mother and daughter feeding
Each other. Mother and daughter breathing
Each other—air also
Takes the easy path. Lungs larynx
Mouth nose whisper whimper scream
All are easy until they are hard.

All are small before they are great.

And I forgive you. Because
This night you are forgivable.

For witnessing without saying
I do. This night. I forgive you.

-M Ashley

Perpetrators, Mourn for Yourselves (poetry)

~ M. Ashley ~ 1 Comment

Maybe that’s the hazard in not caring
who the person is inside the meat
you’re butchering. You never know
if that cow is sacred and capable
of reincarnating herself into a fire-
breathing she-bull and reducing you
and your world to ash and manure

to be forked into the compost pile with
all the rest of the world’s shit—used
to grow whatever nasty things can grow

blooming weeds that grow on the empty graves of
all the other calfs you slaughtered
who have since risen in rage at the she-bull’s call.

Mourn for yourselves at those empty graves
putrid ashen shit flowers, droop and die
cycle through your agony endlessly.

-M. Ashley

Hear me read it:

My Mother’s Attempted Slow Suicide by Refusing to Eat (poetry)

~ M. Ashley ~ 1 Comment

I hope this is the last time my
Tired ass leaves the seat of
This gray vinyl hospital chair
Turned forty-five degrees to
My mother’s gray blanketed
Hospital bed. She’s being
Discharged today to better things
I hope.

Today—leaving day—
Is the first day I noticed there is
Color in this room. I have nothing
Poetry profound to say about
This presence—the coral and blue.
Nothing you can carry in your pocket when
Your mom attempts slow suicide too by
Refusing to eat—to comfort you. To
Reckon the anger. All the anger.

Except to say the color is there.
The color is there, aloof
Of whether you see it or not.

But do see it. See the color.
It’s there.

-M. Ashley
photo taken at Kaiser Ontario Hospital, Ontario, CA

Wet House in the Hungry Forest Where Girls and Boys Go to Die

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

There’s crying in the wallpaper that drips
July swelter. Little girls and little boys and
bigger girls and bigger boys go
here to die. I can feel them
everywhere. Their spirits
got loose but
they are as lost as I am in
this dripping house in
this heavy, hungry forest where no one would find
us, and
certainly no one would hear us and
they see this horror go down and
down and down and they want to take their
big eyes off if but they’re scared of the forest and
the wet in the forest and
all those millions of insects
ready to eat them alive and
pick their bones. I wish I could
tell them they don’t have meat and bones to
pick anymore and they can just go and
float up through the suffocating green and
god wants them
but I don’t know that.

-M. Ashley

Colleen Whose Name Means Girl

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Maybe I should be out
Loud about it. Maybe I
Should talk. I know it
Sure would have helped me
A lot if the woman they
Kept in a box under the
Bed for seven years had
Been a little more chatty.

“These things do happen. They
Do.” We would commiserate
With each other through the
Knothole in her box and the
Keyhole in the door I was
Locked and chained behind

Also for seven years.

Lucky lucky.

“Colleen,” I would whisper so
The bad men wouldn’t hear.

Colleen whose name means
Girl

“Colleen,” I would whisper
“I get you Sister.
I do.”

-M. Ashley

If you are a survivor of sex trafficking, I cannot recommend the organization Journey Out enough. They have helped me tremendously and I am grateful every day that I found them.

An Empty House

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Windows with closed mouths
Wallpaper scrubbed clean
An antique porcelain tub
Where no one drowned
An unfinished basement
Where no one clawed and cried
No horrors under the floorboards
No broken furniture to remember
No shadows in the closets
No starvation in the dining room
Unused door locks
Original doors
Gently closed

-M.