Issue 22
Winter 2020
[The gate to sleep does not fly open but the fence around it falls away]
Renée Ashley
The gate to sleep does not fly open but the fence around it falls away and you have never dreamed like this before. A year from your life dropped like a page from a sheaf. Your brain in its treetop trembles, you’re smaller than you should be. If you are not nothing, you are a flea on a flea on the back of a flea on the back of some goddamn thing so big you’ll never know it. But it’s far more likely you are nothing. And there’s so much you can’t find: forgiveness the utmost. Of course the narrative is boring: Your father told you nothing in words, your mother died at least a hundred times, and there’s no one left to name your squall of imperfections. The last love that left you left you tending only absence. You’ve read, though, that far north of Perth, in the cold coastal waters, there are seven fish choirs—each distinct—that sing like birds at dawn and dusk. Who knew? While every day a dozen times your heart sinks or flies apart again, and it’s impossible to know from which dark—or even if—your one small light might rise.
About the Author
Renée Ashley is the author of Minglements: Prose on Poetry and Life (Del Sol Press) and seven volumes of poetry: Ruined Traveler (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions),The View from the Body (Black Lawrence Press), Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea (Subito Book Prize, University of Colorado—Boulder); Basic Heart (X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, Texas Review Press); The Revisionist’s Dream (Avocet Press); The Various Reasons of Light (Avocet Press); 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. She has received fellowships in both poetry and prose from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment of the Arts. A portion of her poem, “First Book of the Moon,” is included in a permanent installation by the artist Larry Kirkland in Penn Station, Manhattan, NY. She has served as assistant poetry coordinator for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and as poetry editor of The Literary Review. Ashley teaches in the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing and the MA in Creative Writing and Literature for Educators programs at Fairleigh Dickinson University.