Writing Life
We are the gods of piss and bile—
dead skin that flakes from the body
mingles with dust and sweat
makes a sweet filthy paste
worn in the groin and under the breasts.
We are the gods of ashes—
rendered fat that drips from
a wide-eyed sacrifice,
pristine bone, survivor of the fire,
that glints and pings against
the grinder blade
makes the stuff for sausages.
-M. Ashley
Pronounced to rhyme with
“Base.” I’m not that fancy the
Bright flowers are fake.
-M. Ashley
On a frequency we mostly ignore
the city council speaks with a single
yawning head
about a great, gray,
bewildering bus
that authorizes right turns only
that only invisible riders ride
that lurches
up and down the city’s
collapsing artery
to nowhere pleasant
in particular.
-M. Ashley
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. 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
Never Write While Hungry
You’ll roll from aisle to aisle
aimless and slow
eyeballing the shiniest packages first
overhead and at foot
at your groin and at your twitching nose.
You’ll make better bad choices
(still bad choices)
fill your cart with loud
brightly powdered crunchies
that exercise your jaw
but stain your hands
without so much as a goodnight kiss
or any nutritional value at all.
-M. Ashley
The Mt. Vernon bridge will be destroyed
next year
and all the hookers will have to strut
the Santa Fe diesel yard instead.
Some of them will fall on the tracks,
get run over by trains that don’t run anymore,
and their sisters will have to tell their pimps
the unbelievable tale.
The pimps will beat the girls over the ghost trains
until they get superstitious about it,
inquire of the urine-soaked mystic
who works the empty storefront
of what used to be a boutique
for children’s baptism dresses,
For five dollars she’ll confirm a curse
and justify them—
tell them to go on beating the girls
but that they must kiss their rosaries
with each crack of the belt,
each break of a glistening rib,
they must force the girls to read a prayer
off the back of a dollar store bleeding Jesus candle
when otherwise they would have held each other
naked and cried
for a mortal mama who would not come.
They should go on beating the girls.
The mystic shrugs and rolls an addict
wrapped in a government blanket
out of her shady spot
They should go on beating the girls
because what can you do
in a town that wants to survive so badly
despite all the young mothers
and trains and pimps and saints
telling it to lie down and die
to hush now and sleep
to rock-a-bye baby
to shut the fuck up, stop crying, and close its eyes.
-M. Ashley
Underage prostitutes walk past the costume shop
in hundred degree heat
One happily remembers to the other
how she went as Cinderella in third grade
how the lace collar itched
how her hoop skirt got tangled
as she crawled through her church’s
lame haunted house
how a friendly churchman,
the one who baptized her
who was on excellent terms with her mother,
lifted her out of the cardboard box
Tunnel of Doom,
took a long time to untangle her skirt,
then commented how the itchy lace collar
was pretty—
feminine and pretty.
-M. Ashley
M. N. Ashley 