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
Category: Poetry
NaPoWriMo: We Talked a Lot of Shit When I Worked at WalMart
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
NaPoWriMo: Establishing Honestly with God Can Really Knock You on Your Ass
I asked him why the gods expressed
their flowering through rape myths
He looked at me with one dark
eye and said, “I don’t know
how you want me
to answer this question.”
-M. Ashley
NaPoWriMo: Controlled Substances
My pharmacist’s assistant boyfriend
gained weight.
It brings us closer as our fingers
touch over the Hydrocodone
and our wrinkles show
and our noses shine
under the fluorescent lights.
I say in a low voice
“You know they’re for my mother.”
He leans forward and says
so gently
“I know. I remember you.”
I tell him they’re for my mother every time
to prompt his sweet nothing.
I am unashamed. I flounce
out of the pharmacy with my narcotics
swinging my hips.
-M. Ashley
NaPoWriMo: We Women Sure Do Get Tossed Around a Lot
Morning and evening news there
seems always to be one of us
getting murdered by our
mate. And then the news moves
on to talk chirpily about the latest
on what will make us all thin.
The thinner we are
the more easily tossed.
-M. Ashley
NaPoWriMo: I Am an Albino
Unrequited lover of the light
Longing for west and east facing
Curtain-less windows wide open
But built to be shy of the light
Take it all in unrestricted
Get sick from it
My skin cancers
I faint
My iris-less eyes
Twitch in pain
God comforted me once
He said, “Perhaps the light
Is maladapted—not you
Nor your love of it.”
-M. Ashley
NaPoWriMo: My Apple Watch Registered Exercise Goal Exceeded Between 12-1am
We call this sex high
Intensity cat burglary
Midnight jazzercise
Panic attack—
The happiest kind.
-M. Ashley
Happy National Poetry Writing Month everyone!
Wet House in the Hungry Forest Where Girls and Boys Go to Die
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
After a Dream of God in War
Traveler in the city convulsion
Where singed clouds and
Sewers perpetually burst
Walk with me the mud wallow
Streets. Hold the starving pigs
Off. Drowned roaches
Burbling and fallen
Down buildings, all the All, this
Rain must be nuclear too.
My god
My legs are giving way and my
White hair is coming out in wet
Tumbles. Take me in a cab mysteriously
Still running to a dry room
A dry bed.
Count my shivering
Eyelashes as I dream of you.
-M. Ashley
Loose as Leaves
Mr. Hulbert made my hands shake
Before they even touched the keys.
He said they should be loose as leaves
But don’t be afraid to slam the keys
The piano wouldn’t break.
-M.
M. N. Ashley 