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.
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:
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.
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.)
His senses perk to the smell of green grass in a fertile garden, the light of a broad path made plain, a promising crack in the wall, and the laughter of better women echoing.
The one beside him mercifully slips his fingers.
The one beside him mercifully speaks.
Leave me a kiss for my collection, here in the tender crook of my arm, and remember me sometimes that I was your Darling in the dead and lonely place.
In a bigger city, later in life, I would visit the first floor of World’s Largest Porn Store and, the same evening, all three floors of the purple neoned Madame X. On this day, however, a little after 1pm, Bill and I pulled into the parking lot of the little porn store on Highland, the one we grew up walking past with its cream painted windows, wind beaten sign, and handy bus stop access. He and I sat in his red secondhand Jeep with the engine running and air conditioning on, “I will if you will” daring each other to go in.
But then we had to get going or we’d miss sixth period gym.
A line of palm trees standing demure before the great purple face of the city’s eponymous mountains god-gifted with resort quality snow.
Behind the trees, glinting and sprawling like the many mansions of God are the warehouses of Stater Bros. markets, their trucks lining the city’s eponymous avenue ready to serve it first, before serving the rest of the southern half of the state.
Industry portrait of one local boy done good— chamber picture of the wished-for city.
M. N. Ashley 