Tag: Poetry Community

NaPoWriMo: Worst Poem Ever

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

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

NaPoWriMo: We Talked a Lot of Shit When I Worked at WalMart

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

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: Controlled Substances

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

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

Wet House in the Hungry Forest Where Girls and Boys Go to Die

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

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

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

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