Serrano, Latino
Sunburned dark
Jeans
baggy T-shirt
train soot gray
Trenchcoat
patched leather
slain ranchers’ tack
115 degree morning
blacktop risen
shining
son of god
Round shoulders
Clinging glass
windshield clear
beer bottle green.
-M.
Category: God Poems
God Nature
Young Son Virile Boy
Humps his way through the underbrush
Eats out every night
Comes home for dinner
Head grows into the crown
Granddad Limp Limb
Back in the cave
Waits for ointment and
His good bitch to come back
Dad gone
to town for pussy and heartburn
Where’d all the good ones get to?
Loin cloth at the dry cleaner’s
Drags dick and briefcase along the jagged path home
-M.
Communion Delirium
He stained my skin with the fruit of his godhood
crushed young strawberries down against my soft places
left listless trails of bruise and pulp
He placed one and another between my teeth
and commanded I bite like I
was an uncivilized thing
close enough to the leaves and stem
to taste the bitter break
between god and creation.
-M.
Tongues
That he and he and I
could lie
down in a bed together
just to lie
to speak of inner things
to lie
to lie
this bed bears no jealousy.
-M.
The Plutonic Graces
My one beauty
my one pure thing,
I can’t heal you.
I can’t.
The fever’s in your girlish mind.
My hands fail me—
are clawed up by morning.
There is nothing I can hold
through the night.
I have been there before.
Let me focus on my wine,
plying lust.
Play along with me.
Let me hurt you a little more.
Crawl down here with me,
willing.
I’ve given up the face of God.
Yours will do.
Let me scour the trusting flesh
from your cheeks
with stony grave dirt
and self-prophecy.
Rub your nose in it—
cologne
and your blossoming body
of sorrows
still heady in my clothes.
Your scent is changed now.
Woman,
let me thrust into your hands
wet loam and loathing
rotting limp leaves and spoil.
Make glory of them for me
I beg you—
it is all I have left as a man.
You have been a guiding light
and I will never
let you
leave me.
-M.
An Aging God Considers His Birthplace
Golden Sexuality sits by an open window
his hair shining, his lean legs crossed.
He considers the cave-riddled hills
wearing their shadowy green
the glacier-strike lake they curve into
born cold, gone balmy, rippling life.
He remembers stag chases
trysts in the leaves—the fleshy
shock and shudder discovering
exposed roots with his bare back.
He sinks his consciousness into the water
the fingertip tendrils of his god-form first
followed by his instinct-flexed shoulders
still warm from the running catch
his hollow chest where the feral heart echoes
root-wounded back
crossed legs
golden, shining hair.
-M.
Dinner Conversation with a Horny God
![2004_1799[1]](https://mnashley.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/2004_17991.jpg?w=656)
Lie
One fourteen-year-old lies
in another’s lap face-up
squeezing the pimples on her
I’ll-die-for-you-sweetheart’s scabby
sunburned face.
I lie
with you, naked back to the earth
dug deep
moist and freshly turned
picking the teeth of a death trap.
-M.
Stranger
He offered me a cigarette from a gold case.
“Try one of mine,” he said,
and maybe didn’t mean the cigarette.
It could have been laced with psychedelics, but
his deal-striking face
by the blue flame he lit me with
lulled my terror of the monstrosity
it might become later—
the teeth with which he would tear at my inner thighs.
I watched the cherry crawl up the paper—
promiscuous death in her wedding whites.
-M.
A Soft Place to Carry (poem)
He mended his side, his Christ wound
sharply, his face distorted by pain—
the needle a thick catharsis,
the catgut a chanteuse in loose stitches.
He dug out his liver first
to make a nest for his love
who made herself small
enough to crawl in.
Who made herself animal
enough to luxuriate in
the wet perfumes of carnage.
-M.
M. N. Ashley 
