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
Tag: God
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
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
A Mind Consumed with Love and This
Strawberries in a blizzard
God brings you in
A silver bowl
Red flesh
Red flesh
Red flesh all
The red flesh still
warm from the absent sun.
-M.
Photo Poetry: God Flower
Shadow at the tips and
Shadow at the center like
A god who is honest about
What it means to be a god.
Absence
Presence
Glory
Absence
-M.
I am legally blind so I know—photography is a weird sport for me. What I am finding so lovely about it though is that I am often capturing with the camera things I would have never seen with my naked eye. To me, in the bright day, this gazania looked like a simple white blur on a field of messy green. It wasn’t until I got home and started working with the picture that I saw all it’s beautiful purple and that soft explosion of orange at the center. I look forward to many more visual surprises the camera is bound to catch for m.
The Universe a Boy
The Universe a boy with
Feminine hands makes of our
Embraces an enthusiastic
Dogpile somehow straddling both
Our backs at once starry robes
Flung open
Laughing
Light as ether
-M.
Who Am I, God, in the Order of Things?
When the angel comes
Will I know to step back
Will I have love
Or will I have lack?
-M.
All Dizzy Things
The Star is the center. All
Things revolve around it—the
Room, dimly lit—the flashing
Optics—gilded mirrors that
Turn on time—doors pulling
Themselves open and closed—
Gears, wheels, sprockets,
Springs—gods, humanity—
All dizzy things.
-M.
I Dreamed of Sacred Orange Trees Last Night and Want to Make More of It than It Is
Squeezing for juice the
Oranges of the gods sounds
Like a holy testicle trap
A love so large
Deity by the balls
Happens. Praise the gods
And pass the juice glass.
Mercy is a soft hand and
Goes both ways.
-M.
The Star
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.
M. N. Ashley 