Strawberries in a blizzard
God brings you in
A silver bowl
Red flesh
Red flesh
Red flesh all
The red flesh still
warm from the absent sun.
-M.
Category: God Poems
Photo Poetry: God Flower
Shadow at the tips and
Shadow at the center like
A god who is honest about
What it means to be a god.
Absence
Presence
Glory
Absence
-M.
I am legally blind so I know—photography is a weird sport for me. What I am finding so lovely about it though is that I am often capturing with the camera things I would have never seen with my naked eye. To me, in the bright day, this gazania looked like a simple white blur on a field of messy green. It wasn’t until I got home and started working with the picture that I saw all it’s beautiful purple and that soft explosion of orange at the center. I look forward to many more visual surprises the camera is bound to catch for m.
The Universe a Boy
The Universe a boy with
Feminine hands makes of our
Embraces an enthusiastic
Dogpile somehow straddling both
Our backs at once starry robes
Flung open
Laughing
Light as ether
-M.
Who Am I, God, in the Order of Things?
When the angel comes
Will I know to step back
Will I have love
Or will I have lack?
-M.
All Dizzy Things
The Star is the center. All
Things revolve around it—the
Room, dimly lit—the flashing
Optics—gilded mirrors that
Turn on time—doors pulling
Themselves open and closed—
Gears, wheels, sprockets,
Springs—gods, humanity—
All dizzy things.
-M.
I Dreamed of Sacred Orange Trees Last Night and Want to Make More of It than It Is
Squeezing for juice the
Oranges of the gods sounds
Like a holy testicle trap
A love so large
Deity by the balls
Happens. Praise the gods
And pass the juice glass.
Mercy is a soft hand and
Goes both ways.
-M.
The Star
Is he the black dog in the night when
it’s noon and all the lights are on,
or is he the star around which
noon and all the light revolves. To know
him with bare eyes is blindness. We see
him once, poorly, and never anything again
but the flash burned into our corneas—
the red, the lightening purple, the terrible
white. The half memory our only light.
And he would still not be
black dog in the night,
nor black dog at noon.
He would still be the light itself
and we irreversible, starless, dying.
-M.
Tick Tick Tick
Father Time is the G-rated
Version of the voracious
God who ate his children.
Father Time taps his
Tick-tock at me gently
Sighs, smiles, shrugs and
Smooths his lustrous beard.
The voracious god, belly
Full of children
Looks me up and down and
Makes rude comments about
How my tits used to be higher.
I trust this god more.
Our relationship is complicated.
When he leans in for a kiss
His breath stinks like children
And it gets my childless womb
All in an uproar.
I kiss him back anyway. I kiss
Him passionately until his
Breath stinks like safe sex,
Guiltless liquor on weeknights, and
A liberation I’m not even sure
I believe in. It makes him gag
And vomit up his precious children.
-M.
I’m All Wet Anyway
I am suggestible unembracing
my suggestibility without
context often getting my nose
stuck in best-selling
books on god—a new
understanding every day an
oracle in chapter-long
spurts until Heaven
gets too drippy and
I find myself
all wet.
-M.
(Day 1 of my 66 Day Poetry Habit, Take Two)
Mending
A baby blanket the size of
A grown woman’s
Bed—the grown woman
Lying in her god’s lap in
Pain
They go to the bathroom
Together one of those
Weird couples who go to
The bathroom together
Because
She cannot walk or stand on
Her own
Or sit or lie or do
Any other thing on
Her own when that
Pain comes to take
Its tax
Oh my god I’m in
Agony
The Great Destroyer we
Don’t believe in together has
Wrapped me skin and
Bone in thick veils of
Agony
Her god offers her a bit of
Cookie and promises her
This bit of cookie the
First food she’s eaten in
A day
Will be the pleasure of
A prayer
And not make her
Sick it’s a big promise—a
Promise only a great god
Has the heart to make
And keep
-M.
(Day 21 of my 66 Day Poetry Habit. Three weeks! Three weeks on a bit of a sad note, but three weeks nonetheless. I wasn’t going to write today. I thought I needed another P day, but I’m glad I sat down with my book and did it anyway. It’s always better to write than not to write. How often we need that reminder.)
M. N. Ashley 