After the shower fruity
Shampoo smell released
Ascending from a turban unfurled
The Holy Spirit you kept
Under your hat.

-M. Ashley

If the ill-formed shadow-mass of “the civilized”
drives your wild heart to rage and howl
you know it goes on beating.

Though deprived of the lucid heat
of blood-hunts in broad daylight
it stalks within itself and becomes

its own series of revelations—
its own wastes
its own benighted hollows.

The sheep’s clothes hang heavy
but the flocks still fear you sleeplessly—

your shadow-cast
causes their lambs to quiver.

-M. Ashley

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 smells like safe sex,
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. Ashley

We sat at the table with less light
you picked carefully.
Nervous, I walked around it the wrong way
twice.
I had walked around the car the wrong way too
before stepping up onto the curb.

I hope you didn’t see that.
I had trouble finding the door.

Before,
I padded through my cool bedroom
getting dressed, getting ready,
and stuck the mascara wand directly
in my eye.
I forgot here and there
which garment came after which—and
I tell you it’s a miracle I met you
with my bra on under my clothes.

Inside you found me,
dressed and made up with the same
kind of hot trouble that adorns your coffee.
I did one eyebrow darker than the other
accidentally
but only worried about you noticing
in the fraction of time it took
for us to embrace
and stake the flag of our friendship
through the vanquished body of fear.

No self-consciousness here. No need.
Not one.

We held hands and spoke of esoteric things.
I will tell you the light was all yours
that attracted a witness prowling for converts
and a man with a chaos tattoo.
The prowler wanted to suffocate the light.
The tattooed man poked it curiously.
And I sat looking with one dark eyebrow raised
loving you for it—
for your fire
for your shadows too. Call. Call.

-M. Ashley

My teeth crumble
disease-gray gravel
embedded in wet
disease-gray globs—

the unset cement of
recurring terrors spat
into one of Dad’s coffee
stained handkerchiefs.

My jaw and right cheekbone
unhinge. Too much
loss. Too much loss.
Too much neglect.

Too much neglect. Too
many blows to the
little pink precocious
mouth.

-M. Ashley

A black-robed inquisitor, slight of body,
disrobed by his mother often, angry.

A big mouth woman, always open, pronouncing
her lack of cock and balls as blessing upon the dirty,
dark-haired girls who give birth in the street.

A sentient whip that licks chunks of her off its leather,
closes its eyes and rapturous
splits her open from ass to nape,
slashes harder, harder her sweaty inner thighs.

A stake, a torch, a flame, her silence—
the rendered fat, the glistening bone.

The misshapen baby with a port wine stain
who toddles off at night on his rickety legs
to die curled in the blind ivy that overtook her grave.

-M. Ashley