Writing Life
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 like a Galapagos of spooks
where all manner and species
of good ghosts were left
coughing blood and lovers’ names
into collapsing hallways.
-M. Ashley
My Uncle Chuck’s house backed up against one of the humps of Little Mountain. As far as I know, Little Mountain has two major humps separated by two apartment complexes, two tracts of homes, two schools, and, lately, a strip mall, an iHop, a McDonals’s and a Starbucks always bustling with CalState Berdoo students.
My Uncle Chuck’s house butted up against the back of it and there was a small piece of it in his yard. I knew it intimately. He landscaped the crap out of it. He not only planted gorgeous plants everywhere, but he dug great paths and steps into the dirt so my sister, my cousins, and I could go run and chase all over it, minding the ankle-eating gofer holes of course.
We used to love to dig holes in that hill ourselves. My uncle had shovels for us all and, wherever he was working on some worthy project on the hill, there were my two boy cousins and I also working, digging holes to China or, if we were really ambitious, digging a hole large enough for us to sit it. Sometimes that took days, but the prestige that came with climbing into your own hole was well worth it.
-M. Ashley
I dreamed of a very short person,
flailing,
asking me if I knew Brutus.
Yes, I said, yes, yes I knew Brutus.
Et tu Brute, and all that,
chewed forever in the second mouth of Satan.
Yes, yes, I did. Brutus and I were familiar.
The short person, neither man nor woman,
older than young but not old, dark haired,
flailed wilder and screamed, No, no. No.
You do not know Brutus. Not that Brutus.
You do not know.
Now, of course, waking,
I worry about twenty-three stab wounds on the Senate steps.
I worry about most of them finding mark in my spine.
I worry about not being hero enough for my bloody back
to be counted a travesty. I worry about cruel gravity
pulling me into the arms of a son or daughter metaphorical
who I failed to acknowledge in real life,
and trading betrayal for betrayal with my child
by each other’s sticky, dilating eyes.
-M. Ashley
Maybe that’s the hazard in not caring
who the person is inside the meat
you’re butchering. You never know
if that cow is sacred and capable
of reincarnating herself into a fire-
breathing she-bull and reducing you
and your world to ash and manure
to be forked into the compost pile with
all the rest of the world’s shit—used
to grow whatever nasty things can grow
blooming weeds that grow on the empty graves of
all the other calfs you slaughtered
who have since risen in rage at the she-bull’s call.
Mourn for yourselves at those empty graves
putrid ashen shit flowers, droop and die
cycle through your agony endlessly.
-M. Ashley
Hear me read it:
The night you find yourself alone
outside an emergency room
with a concussion
in a bad part of town
having paid a bill
you can’t afford to pay
waiting for a cab and shivering
because it’s February
and you left your coat at work
which is where you were injured
which is where you left blood
on the ground
which is where the first words
out of your boss’ mouth
were to inform you
and your involuntarily closing eyes
that if you reported it
the safety record would be ruined
and no one
would get a pizza party
after all.
-M. Ashley
I still feel guilty about messing up the pizza party. Hear me read it:
A single winking caterpillar
prances the perimeter lips
of a useless tongue
gone limp
and dry from shrieking,
gone swollen and lolling
out of the mouth,
gone self-bitten,
gone self-condemned,
gone bloody,
gone dead giveaway.
-M. Ashley
Hear me read it:
for Z. Bayor
Patting his bowling ball belly,
my Hungarian violin teacher would say,
“This is my integrity!” then laugh
and point to places in the music
where it was OK for me to blink.
It was a perfectionist problem, he declared,
knowing better. “A perfectionist problem!”
why I kept my eyes open, why I cried
when I played, why I was “Masterful!”
he said, at shoving my shoulders
into my ear canals—why he trotted out
his “integrity” regularly to buy my smile.
Trust your bright hands can handle things
when you need to close your eyes.
He rested his celebrated fingertips
on my right shoulder.
“You don’t have to go any faster than this.”
He rocked with me like he used to
with his lucky daughters and sons.
And he sang,
“doe-mi-so
so-mi-doe
doe-mi-doe…”
-M. Ashley
Another one I found buried deep in my notebook. I miss this man. If only I could do a Hungarian accent! Hear me read it:
Walking tired the plains of Desolation,
a lost man lowers himself hard to the earth.
A woman comes to sit beside him.
This is her home and she is not lost.
She uncovers his face,
pulls his shaming hands away.
She has drawn dust angels for him
with her clay-covered toes.
He sees them and sees they are miraculous—
her toes
and the way her naked legs lay
parallel to the angels’ outstretched wings.
And he tells her she is beautiful.
And she does not believe him.
-M. Ashley
Hear me read it:
It is hard not to get sentimental when talking about my teachers. I have so many well-worn anecdotes. I’ve gone through them all so many times verbally, it seems they would be a complete bore to talk about. There is one though that I think I only ever jotted notes down about once. It’s often too much.
At first, I hated my poetry professor at Vanderbilt, Professor Daniels. She was hard on me. She spanked my ego good and I didn’t like it. I thought I was some kind of hot shit going into her class, and man oh man, did I find out otherwise. She was cold and exacting and had no warm and squishies for me whatsoever. Even after I earned a modicum of her respect, I was still nervous around her. I would drop things and turn around in circles trying to find my chair. It was perpetually like being on a first date.
She was a tiny woman, apparently a lot older than I thought she was. I made a reference to an 80’s band once and she said she wouldn’t know anything about it when here I had assumed she was only maybe a decade older than I was. For all her hardness, there must have been a youth about her I perceived. My legally blind eyes could not see her wrinkles so my mind registered her as a bitter eighties Gen X St. Elmo’s Fire type instead of ex-hippie observer and poetry writer-abouter.
I was being abused at home. I met her at the grocery store, me wearing a full length houndstooth wool coat in 80 degree heat to cover the bruises and burns. She pulled her cart up next to mine. She took time to talk to me. I told her I had to leave Vanderbilt, which was very hard. She said to me, pleading, “Please don’t stop writing.” It stays with me, that she would plead with me this way. I keep it in my own head when I’m about to give up.
Maybe I don’t talk about it because I can never quite get the emotion of it. I always seem to need to invent a touch of hands or squeeze of the wrist to go with it. The truth is, she didn’t touch me at all. Or at least, I think that’s the truth. The memory is fuzzy. I think I have been lying to myself for so long in my memory about that touch, that I truly don’t know anymore. Knowing her character though, I don’t think there was one, which makes my soul burst with longing.
-M. Ashley
I am going to start including audio recordings of me reading my posts for my visually impaired friends, or really anyone who enjoys what I hope will be a good listen. Being visually impaired myself, I’m a little ashamed I’ve had this blog for a million years and am only thinking of this now. Hear it here:
Artificial light blue to beat the blues
Try no sugar in your cookie, Cookie
Cutter approaches don’t often
Help problematic inflammation in the gray
Matter of fact exercise
Is another lever we can pull
Me closer Dr. Beautiful Blue Eyes
Blue—nothing artificial about you-ooh
Tell me again
How the mental health benefits of exercise
Cap at thirty minutes so I can
Lap my sad to death in the
Beautiful chlorine blue.
-M. Ashley
(Found this one buried in my notebook. I had almost forgotten about it. One of my very favorites.)
Hear me read it:
M. N. Ashley 