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
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
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
We call this sex high
Intensity cat burglary
Midnight jazzercise
Panic attack—
The happiest kind.
-M. Ashley
Happy National Poetry Writing Month everyone!
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
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
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.
We put up with a certain level of
Gross from our lovers and
Farting on each other in bed and
Giggling about it and
Don’t you dare Dutch oven me
Again… Chester!
Can be as intimate as
The world’s sweetest
Sulfur kiss.
-M. Ashley
Find me on TikTok at: MNAshleyPoetry
Maybe I should be out
Loud about it. Maybe I
Should talk. I know it
Sure would have helped me
A lot if the woman they
Kept in a box under the
Bed for seven years had
Been a little more chatty.
“These things do happen. They
Do.” We would commiserate
With each other through the
Knothole in her box and the
Keyhole in the door I was
Locked and chained behind
Also for seven years.
Lucky lucky.
“Colleen,” I would whisper so
The bad men wouldn’t hear.
Colleen whose name means
Girl
“Colleen,” I would whisper
“I get you Sister.
I do.”
-M. Ashley
If you are a survivor of sex trafficking, I cannot recommend the organization Journey Out enough. They have helped me tremendously and I am grateful every day that I found them.
Deja vu all
Over the place
I’m waiting
For the second
Shoe to drop
Again.
-M.
M. N. Ashley 