Three Micros by Britt Ashley


Advice on Leaving Your Own Crime Scene Gracefully

Get up. Get up and unwreck your dress, unpunish the vase of blushing peonies. Gather the thousand ants let loose from each busy bloom. Shake the glass from your hair and ravel your stockings. Restring all the bright beads of your necklace, which clatter across the entryway like teeth. Shut your mouth. Shut your mouth and restore your wrists to the right angle. Shut your mouth, and ascend the grand staircase. Hush the air back to your lungs and hold your last breath.


I Never Met a House I Didn’t Want to Burn Down

When I was younger, I wore my hair shattered and stained every shade of red I found under the bathroom sink. A dizzying spectrum of dyes left behind by old roommates and ambitious ex-girlfriends. I wore it big and bloody like a sunset, like the final scene of a drive-in movie in which only one girl survives. She was always me.


Persephone Rewrites an Introduction to Ovid

 
Usually in this story,
                                                                                                                                                            some
              monster                                              always careful
                          with                     his gloomy kingdom
 
                                                               was quite                     passionately in love
                                                                                                                                                                with
                                                         me
 
                     Fortunately                                                    I had plans already
 
 
 
Though this part does not occur
                                                                                                       I
 
               open the ground beneath me                            Only (the sun)
 
                                                                                           sees me fall
 
 
         I refuse                                                                                   and become
 
                                                             my own city