Writing Life
He offered me a cigarette from a gold case.
“Try one of mine,” he said,
and maybe didn’t mean the cigarette.
It could have been laced with psychedelics, but
his deal-striking face
by the blue flame he lit me with
lulled my terror of the monstrosity
it might become later—
the teeth with which he would tear at my inner thighs.
I watched the cherry crawl up the paper—
promiscuous death in her wedding whites.
-M.
In the back bedroom at the little
fold down desk eating my snack
of a Ding Dong and room temperature
Diet Cherry Pepsi
annoyed at the immovable maps and
call-in bomb-dodging journalists
soaking up the screen where my
Beverly Hills Teens and She-Ra should be.
Especially She-Ra.
She
more than the bomb-dodging journalists
was type for the writer
I wanted to be one day.
-M.
Thought I was special.
My cabbage didn’t stink like
other people’s did.
-M.
I want to be a poet and in general a writer of things, but I don’t want to be in academia.
This is my confession:
I don’t want any part of academia. It seems like becoming a nun, cloistered unto myself and married to analysis and rancor over other people’s work. It doesn’t seem like it gives one the opportunity to gush and flow and live and move. I know it does for some people, but not for me.
I want to be Indiana Jones of the writerly wilds, dammit. I want to be out in the world experiencing and tasting and taking in air and breathing life deep into my lungs. I don’t believe this involves necessarily getting back to nature or primal man or whatever Thoreau was blathering about. I do believe it means getting back to the world in all her splendors, realizing that the human, the created, and the creators are as much a part of nature as birds and trees and famous ponds.
It is scary admitting outright that I don’t want to be a part of academia because how else is a writer supposed to make her living? The world knows that this is what poets and creative writers, (who don’t write pop fiction) do with themselves. This is the only thing they do with themselves. This is how they survive—this insular world of poets breeding poets.
I’m too hard on academics and I don’t mean to be. There are plenty, (I think of my teachers for example), who love what they do and the community in which they do it. Teachers are incredibly important. I wouldn’t be anything without the marvelous ones I have had. I acknowledge all of this and I praise them from my bones. I also acknowledge that although I do wish to teach, being solidly and solely a part of academia is not what I want at all.
I will find another way.
-M.
There is always one
bossy ass bird. He digs himself
a naked hole in the dense
mockorange, puffs out his chest and
sings at 11. The sparrows who live there
too roll their eyes and go on
collecting tufts of red dog
hair from between the fence slats
to make their nests luxurious—
and sound proof.
-M.
I am trying to sleep and the neighbors
two doors down have a live mariachi
band in their backyard. It is three
days before St. Patrick’s Day.
I imagine the nachos, con guac,
a perfect metaphor for the Cathy’s
and the Prods. By force of hand the
orange and the green come
together—messily. They fight it out
in the gut.
-M.
One sanatorium in particular,
given back to time and riveted
to an island at the seaward head
of a canal in an ancient city,
became a Galapagos of spooks
where all manner and species
of good ghosts were left evolving—
coughing blood and lovers’ names
into collapsing hallways.
-M.
like the one about the red blouse
the sunglasses,
the black shoes with red stitching—
meeting for the first time, again, and
being able to walk on his arm
in the bright sun without stumbling.
-M.
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
hot-girl 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.
…was, “the street screams a magenta goodbye.”
I read that my senior year of college, which was a certain number of years ago, and it still irritates the hell out of me.
-M.
(Although the worst line of poetry I ever wrote was probably much, much worse. I think it involved cerulean unicorns.)
-M.
M. N. Ashley 