POETRY – from Her Book of Difficulties

by Renée Ashley

Photo Credit: Joy Stocke

[So much forgiveness] to ask & it’s hard for her—

all opening & a train barreling through She can’t

get her feet to stay on the ground She’s untethered

The sere western hills are always about to burst &

there is never a hope like the last hope Still the

calla on her inner wrist throws light & is small

with a tincture of shade Lily closer than the real

thing The wrist itself thick & too easily fractured

She fears—not death—but death by fire death by

water & cannot guess what is in those hills that

lends her such quick comfort That they are always

there perhaps She never imagines Sky King in

black & white sweeping in from the clear blue of

the western sky Cannot imagine that he would dip

the wings of his primitive plane & scoop her from

the air All her lucks align in a complicated &

ironic way Her once-removed histories of water &

fire what do they have to do with her Oh what is

impulse & what is holding on too long

Ohmygod so happy all day Sun & picking calla

plants alyssum—sweet–& bugle weed from a

garden store to settle the dust beneath the

recovering wisteria More sun than she’s allowed

herself in years & she knows by the time it’s

August she’ll watch the flowers fricassee She

won’t save them in that murderous light Annette

Funicello & Margaret Thatcher are dead & just

over the mountain the mountain is burning She’s

fiercely grateful for the absence of wind Let it

please not reach the toxic dump Let it not make its

way towards her home There’s still so much she’d

like to do before her own last flames are kindled

by this every night: to bathe both dogs to peel the

wasted apples for the cake—she’s craved that

cake for months—to read & sigh loudly with the

black dog on her lap Her felt & plastic mouse ears

on the wall on the plastic Frankenstein head

nailed there three feet above the big TV She wants

to see the callas bloom in their new blue pots & if

she has to grow older let her & the dogs drift

together into their age Let them all die dreaming

together unaware of the flames around them

Renée Ashley

Renée Ashley is the author of five volumes of poetry: Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea (Subito Book Prize); Basic Heart (winner of the 2008 X.J.Kennedy Poetry Prize); The Revisionist’s Dream; The Various Reasons of Light; and Salt (Brittingham Prize in Poetry, University of Wisconsin Press), as well as a novel, Someplace Like This, and two chapbooks, The Museum of Lost Wings and The Verbs of Desiring. Ashley teaches poetry in the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing and across the genres in the MA in Creative Writing and Literature for Educators. She has received fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in both poetry and prose and a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A portion of her poem, “First Book of the Moon,” is included in a permanent installation in Penn Station, Manhattan, by the artist Larry Kirkland. She has served as Assistant Poetry Coordinator for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and, for seven years, as Poetry Editor of The Literary Review. Her new collection, The View from the Body, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2016.

RENéE ASHLEY IN THIS EDITION:
POETRY – from Her Book of Difficulties

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ISSN: 1932-362X