Writing Life
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
In one such re-birthed home off Elliston,
a neo-beatnik coffee-beer-food joint spills
red neon light into the street
where dusky jazz from the “Backdeck”
skitters with dead leaves
down the cracked one-way blacktop—
falls and rises with the daredevil sparrows
that dive-bomb the al fresco eaters’ feet
looking for renegade Tater Tots.
On a cloud of sweet clove cigarette smoke
the hustle of something like
multigenerational intellectualism
floats over the noise
while the silver-haired owner
buses the tables himself,
magnanimously,
wearing jean shorts,
white socks,
and Jesus sandals, worn-through.
-M. Ashley
Unincorporated island—
city corpus surrounds this
dusty stump
where no appendage grew,
no sidewalks either. All negative
space—all septic. Streetlights
are rare.
Casual murders In the night,
in its little triangular park occur
by desert exposure, by gangs
statistically impressive.
Twitching bodies in the weedy sand.
Rigor mortis limbs, one tangled
in a swing—seat and chain—
one stretched for shelter
of the sun-disfigured slides.
-M. Ashley
I have officially posted every day in April for NaPoWriMo! I’ve never completed it before. Thank you all for reading along. Onward and forward!
Your School of Music staff picture made
you out to be so much uglier than
you actually are so
I couldn’t show my friends, so
we couldn’t fan ourselves with our
fangirl palms and drool together over
you.
I couldn’t make them understand the
dark-haired, fair-faced impetus for
trotting a mile to class in
the actual spiked Mary Janes that
made de Sade himself blanch—
what pale, long-fingered hand moving
half notes from here to there delectability made
me choose the long sensuous skirt with
the long sensuous slit, (oh mid 90’s rage!)
what high-toned atonal muscle, what
used-to-be-high-school-outcast humor
made me squeeze my thighs together
surreptitiously between
this-will-be-on-the-quiz cues.
Dr. Link—may I call you Stan—
of course I may, I
was also madly in love with
every single silver button on
your early spring black jacket.
-M. Ashley
It’s going to be over a hundred here
this weekend
so roaches have started coming up
from under the slab. Great big ones
of the outdoor variety looking for water
and morsels of dog food.
It gives me nightmares of Oklahoma,
of poverty, of you
leaving empty syruped peach cans
on the floor,
open cereal boxes on the counter,
making coffee anyway in a machine
the water container of which
was infested with molting nymphs.
You called them albino roaches,
Fucker,
and laughed and said
I was your freakshow baby.
-M. Ashley
The base note has something to do with
sunscreen—a fair haired girl’s
most important piece of camping gear
next to bug spray
which is the sharp second layer of the scent.
The whiff of stiff, chlorinated towels,
unwashed and hot from the top
of the waist-high chain link fence
they were draped over to dry
completes the first perfumer’s chord.
For nuance, a drop of happy sweat
from happy children come to wash
their hands and faces with pink powdered soap
from lime green metal dispensers
hung over shabby sinks
on which daddy long legs perch
each rolling their eight dull eyes
at the rush and frivolity of the new generation.
-M. Ashley
It’s like we live a great distance apart
and come to visit sometimes,
but usually when the other is away.
We walk around, touch the dust kindly,
see we’ve both been busy breaking
and stacking colored glass in the windowsills—
methodical about hue and striation.
This one is like a bear and this one a bird.
This one is like a wave and this one a glacier.
This one is sunlight. This one is also sunlight.
How are you? I’m embarrassed it’s been so long.
I know there has been so much and I care very much.
I hope you know.
-M. Ashley
When my grandmother knew she was dying
she picked out an opal for me,
had a ring designed
and sized it,
for the short time being,
for her own hand.
I was an infant then, recently diagnosed
lifelong colorless and could-be blind.
My grandmother was a force—
a farm girl who took beatings
for sneaking away to read,
a young woman who left her family
to work among foul mouthed boys
at the Pentagon during WWII,
a single mother,
a stone wall,
razor tongue,
acid wit,
first female management at the FAA.
She held me at the hospital
in a hallway while the final diagnosis
was pronounced to my parents
in a tiny, sterile room.
Her breast was warm,
though the breathing behind it was labored.
Her embrace was soothing
though her hands were not soft
from folding crust-cut sandwiches in wax paper
for her children or grandchildren’s outings
of uncomplicated youth.
She explored my hot face and closed eyelids
with her wise yet diminishing fingers,
the opal slipping forward and upside down
under her nearly exposed knuckle,
resting against my forehead,
cooling a spot just above my eyes.
She leaned forward and blessed me,
“My dear little Michelle-y,
I do hope you can see.”
-M. Ashley
M. N. Ashley 