Writing Life
A line of palm trees standing demure
before the great purple face
of the city’s eponymous mountains
god-gifted with resort quality snow.
Behind the trees, glinting and sprawling
like the many mansions of God
are the warehouses of Stater Bros. markets,
their trucks lining the city’s eponymous avenue
ready to serve it first, before serving the rest
of the southern half of the state.
Industry portrait
of one local boy
done good—
chamber picture
of the wished-for city.
-M. Ashley
“My poor world!” I want to say,
as I sit here surrounded by abundance.
We’re poor until we aren’t and then
sitting in a room full of gold like
Scrooge’s Money Bin we wonder
why the gold isn’t at least one foot
deeper so we could move our diving board
one foot higher and get that extra
adrenaline rush as we free-fall
further into the abundance for which
we are never quite grateful enough.
We hit the pile of gold like a ton of bricks
(Family Guy did a cutaway about that—
great minds…). We aren’t made of feathers
like Scrooge McDuck, so we platz
and break all our bones when we intended
to dive in and swim through, sensuously.
There is this riddle about what weighs more:
a pound of gold or a pound of feathers.
A pound is a pound
unless you’re talking about the pound
of flesh that hit the unforgiving gold.
-M. Ashley
We are not the arsonists of August
nor the fire-pushing winds of pre-fall.
We are the burnt black hills of November
in the hot, short shadow of which
we gather our families in thanksgiving
that from us
the doomed young grasses of March will grow
to blue the sky for a month
and draw foreign shepherds here
to graze their great flocks of bell-ringing lambs.
-M. Ashley
Me and a priest not in a bar.
Me and a priest in a red-carpeted office.
The windows are stained.
I can’t see it in the dark but
I have faith in the stain.
I have faith in the red carpet.
I have faith the lilies in the wallpaper
will fade but never go gold.
Me with a little scroll in my hand—
questions for the learned man
rolled out on that carpet, the length of
God’s hundred arms outstretched
fingertips to shoulders to incorporeal fingertips.
We roll up our sleeves.
He cracks his knuckles.
I swivel and pop my neck.
Someone or
some thing
will be salvaged tonight.
I lead with my best foot:
“I’d be Catholic, but
I don’t believe in sin.”
-M. Ashley
Happy National Poetry Writing Month everyone!
We don’t look down on
each other here. This one forced
this one willing, this one forced
by force, this one forced by
circumstances, this one forced
and not knowing it, thinking that she,
in her non-stripper shoes, in control of
the chess board, receiving presents
is above it.
We all cry into the same
sweaty pillows.
-M. Ashley
I trace your ribs
In cerulean ink
Dewdrops of blue
On the skin
A connect-the-dots
That somehow
Resembles a unicorn
In calligraphy lines
A unicorn with the stripes
Of your bones
A child of myth
And the Serengeti
A mythical zebra with a horn
They must have had unicorns
In the Serengeti too
And your ribs
And my ink
Must have been
What their pelts looked like
On the walls of mythical hunters
If they had pottery
In the mythical Serengeti
And this cerulean ink
Would stick
I would trace your ribs
On the pottery too
While you are sleeping
The rise and fall of your abdomen
With your sacred breath
The reason the lines would be blurred
Not my tears, my love
Not my tears
-M. Ashley
My own soul, these days,
Dry but mostly cling,
needs a little static release,
needs a sacheted drawer
to sleep in.
-M. Ashley
Rebellion in a thousand silver
Candy wrappers thrown on the floor
Each one reflects a side of my face
My face gets bigger
The mirror must also get bigger
So say the lying mirror wrappers
-M. Ashley
And once you lose the weight
If you do ever
You will have hours of free time
To focus on everything else you
Hate about your body. The algorithm
Has products for those things too.
-M. Ashley
Where we gassed and gabbed
we ground our cigarettes out
on the concrete window ledge
in front of the bustling store—
in front of our managers, what
kind of fuck did we give? Our
feet and backs were killing us and
somebody pissed in the fitting room
again. Someone left a dirty diaper
open in a shopping cart. Literal
shit. You customers deserved
every dirty thing we said.
-M. Ashley
M. N. Ashley 