ASHE VERNON

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What are some tips to writing poetry?

Find the softest, darkest bruise. Press with your thumb until the hurt starts to make sense.

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This ask from six years ago has been bouncing around my head lately for some reason and I really wanted to revisit it. I don’t think it’s... bad advice, necessarily. I think you can make some very good art this way, and I think it’s possible to healthily and productively revisit, process, and make art about the things that have hurt you.

But if I could give any advice to young poets, knowing what I know now, it’s this:

Not everything needs to be a poem. Not everything is ready to be a poem. And not everything that needs to be a poem needs to be shown to the world. Sometimes, you need to sit with things. You need the safety of privacy to process them. Sometimes, even when you have processed it, there is nothing to be gained by returning to it.

And it can be really difficult to learn the difference between things which need unpacking and things which need space to heal. You will get this wrong, sometimes. It’s okay to get it wrong. What’s important is to allow yourself to learn from those mistakes and not to trick yourself into thinking the pain is simply part of the process. The pain is not part of the process. If you are finding no comfort, no catharsis, no closure, please step back and reevaluate why you are doing what you’re doing and what you hope to get out of it.

It is okay to let old hurts lie. Hurting is not the only way the work gets done. You do not have to keep pushing your thumb into the same old bruises.

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GORGON by Ashe Vernon

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GORGON by Ashe Vernon

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GORGON by Ashe Vernon

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November is knee-deep in old love.

And the problem with stagnant water

is how it putrefies, how a clean thing

can go heavy, how it stinks.

Cold presses on the mattress and

heartache crawls out from under it,

dripping hot honey into your open mouth until you drown like a turkey in the rain.

(You are not the hero of this story.

Even if it’s yours.)

You watch

the people you love

love each other

and feel like a child,

face pressed against

a store window,

begging for something

you are not allowed

to have.

NOVEMBER IS AN ABANDONED BEE HIVE, by Ashe Vernon

[latenightcornerstore]

November is knee-deep in old love.

And the problem with stagnant water

is how it putrefies, how a clean thing

can go heavy, how it stinks.

Cold presses on the mattress and

heartache crawls out from under it,

dripping hot honey into your open mouth until you drown like a turkey in the rain.

(You are not the hero of this story.

Even if it’s yours.)

You watch

the people you love

love each other

and feel like a child,

face pressed against

a store window,

begging for something

you are not allowed

to have.

NOVEMBER IS AN ABANDONED BEE HIVE, by Ashe Vernon

[latenightcornerstore]

November is knee-deep in old love.

And the problem with stagnant water

is how it putrefies, how a clean thing

can go heavy, how it stinks.

Cold presses on the mattress and

heartache crawls out from under it,

dripping hot honey into your open mouth until you drown like a turkey in the rain.

(You are not the hero of this story.

Even if it’s yours.)

You watch

the people you love

love each other

and feel like a child,

face pressed against

a store window,

begging for something

you are not allowed

to have.

NOVEMBER IS AN ABANDONED BEE HIVE, by Ashe Vernon

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Under your hands, I bloom into ache– and heat and want. And heavy breath and mouth and mouth and mouth. I melt, all syrup on your fingers. You could almost spin me into candy floss, except for this weight on your hips: this body and how it buckles for your body.

SPUN SUGAR by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)

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I know that, in theory, love is supposed to be soft. I have felt soft love, before, but— for the last two months, love has been sledgehammer to my nervous system. It keeps taking me out at the knees. For the thousandth time, I remind myself that want and need are two different things. I remind myself, to be needed is not love. I kiss like a seed trying desperately to put down roots in wet soil. I keep trying to turn wild animal. He keeps trying to make a home from my skeleton. Neither of us is doing this the right way. In spite of that, we keep crashing our bodies together: expecting someone to catch us even when we’ve become falling anvils, cartoon pianos, sticks of live dynamite. I’ve done this song and dance before. I already know I will let him turn me shelter even while my roof is leaking. I’ll put my mouth everywhere that hurts. I’m good at it: unearthing my foundations and giving them to other people. It’s no wonder I have trouble standing on my own two feet. It’s no wonder I’m so prone to slide downhill. Even then, I still believe in a love that will meet me at my own altar. A love that patches the holes in the ceiling. A love who comes, heart in hand, and means it.

UNTIL THEN by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)

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It seems like every time I sit down to write about our bodies, I spin us something holy: our moans turned scripture, our mouths flooded with communion wine. I want to take you by the hips and build our gospel. Except, I wonder if I’m afraid to name you without the metaphor: like the honeysuckle holy of you would burn my tongue if I took it in vain. See, you leave sunspots on my vision. Your hands are softer than any altar and twice as sacred. Your mouth keeps me up at night, even when you are two cities over. Even when it’s been days without you in my bed. Even then. See, there is heat. And there is friction. And then there’s us, and we are something else, altogether. Some kind of burning. But you have never been all-consuming. You have never been Almighty. You are a pair of hands I never want to let go of, and maybe that’s its own religion, but maybe it isn’t. Maybe, I can still come to you on hands and knees, and it doesn’t have to be a kind of praying. It could be my mouth and your thighs, and the way you moaning my name splits the quiet. Maybe we don’t have to be a pocket of heaven to be just as beautiful. So, if I become more choir than angel, if you become more tenement than temple, if we stop trying so hard to be so sacred, we might find that heaven was never as gorgeous as we are.

SACRILEGE REDUX by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)

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One of my mother’s coworkers is the kid who molested me in high school and I don’t like that he is still within arm’s reach of the women in my family. His name comes up at Christmas dinner and I grit my teeth. He was not supposed to stay so long in my story. He was supposed to be exit wound. Bad dream. Aftertaste. When they talk about cutting your abusers from your life, they don’t talk about what do to when he and your mom share the same nine-to-five. And I know he talks to her, like he’s got nothing to be ashamed of. Like he shouldn’t have been on hands and knees begging her forgiveness from day one. And I wonder if he ever asks about me, or if men like him even care about the ones they’ve left in their aftermath. But I am not what he did to me. I can’t erase him from my story, but I’m writing him into the margins. He will be a footnote in my history. His mouth will never again dirty my name. He will go faceless into a future that does not know him and does not want him. Getting away with it is not the same as innocence. I will never say his name again.

FOOTNOTE by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)

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Two years ago, you were all white knuckle and grit. You abandoned your softness in a cardboard box on the side of the road—decided it was someone else’s problem, now. Two years ago, your depression was an undiagnosed monster in the pit of your stomach and it swallowed everything. You felt like a cardboard cutout of a person; you felt like TV static. You wrote yourself into something ugly so that you didn’t have to be so soft– so small, so honey-heart. It didn’t work, did it? Take a good look at the person you become two years from now: look how she is frayed at the edges like hand-me-down lace. Look how her bones are too old for her, how they creak like a house full of someone else’s photo albums. Look how soft she is: like you could press your hand right through her stomach and come out the other side. She knows, that every boy you fall in love with between there and now takes you for granted. Every girl who lets you kiss her stops texting you back. That you keep filling your empty bed, because you don’t know how to fill your empty chest. Trouble is, you keep falling in love with open wounds then acting surprised when you are left with nothing but blood in a lifeboat. It’s time to stop sinking. You are important, even if no one ever likes your poetry. You are important, even if he doesn’t love you back, even if she’s only interested in sleeping with you, even if he isn’t. Your voice matters, even if no one listens to it. Your worth does not come with clauses and conditions. It does not disappear with no one to validate it– you are valid. Even if no one else thinks so. Two years from now, you will be soft. You will be all split-ends and paperbacks. It will hurt. And it’ll be okay. These are the growing pains we never grow out of. I know you never asked to be born. But that’s because people don’t ask for miracles: they are given. You exist, even though it would be much easier for you not to. Even though there are literally billions of events that had to happen before you could happen, which makes you one of the most improbable things in existence and yet, you are here. But I don’t expect you to say thank you. There is too much ache in your upbringing. There have been too many bad days. Two years ago, you declared war on your gentle everything. It will take the full two years to realize you are only hurting yourself.

SELF PORTRAIT DRESSED AS A SELF-HELP PROGRAM by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)

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So you see yourself as a revolving door: a place people keep passing through but never want to stay. You get used to the idea of impermanence– never fall in love without an exit strategy, a way to untangle your heart when they leave you. (And they always leave you. That part, at least, is constant.) When you become, instead, a dead end, a back alley, a Do Not Enter, they want to know why you are suddenly unavailable. You show them hands calloused from all this giving–ask if they have ever loved a day in their life, ask why everything you had was never enough to satisfy. Trouble is, you see yourself as a peace offering: a willing body meant to keep the quiet quiet. And you throw yourself at every open mouth. So your method of coping looks more like taking your body to market just to see who’s willing to buy it. This is how you give yourself up in pieces, but never notice what you’re missing. It’s how you use sex as just another way to hurt yourself. How you become nameless in the face of all the things you want in parts and pieces but refuse to accept in full. Love becomes a fairy tale that scares you. Kisses, safe only in small doses–it’s dangerous to get attached to the things that never want you. Or worse, the ones who want to keep you: like an animal, like a trophy, like bragging rights. When all you’ve ever wanted is somebody who would keep you like a promise.

STAY by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)

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This is the story of two boys in love. Boys who never knew any kind of life but running. Boys who kissed across the train track that carved through what it was they wanted and what they were told they could never have. These boys put their toes to the rails like runners at the starting line. No time for that scuffed shoes, knock-kneed, slow burn kind of love. They had to love fast or the train would catch them. Had to love fast ‘cause they’re no use to anyone dead. It’s the story of a boy named Rebecca— a boy whose skin was drawn up in the wrong size. A boy who spent the winter bringing snowflakes to his mama because he liked the way they gleamed in the light. It’s the story of a boy who hated wearing dresses, a boy terrified of the nothing between his thighs. This boy ran before he could walk and dreamed of the men on Mount Olympus, because they were allowed to be both beautiful and strong. This boy, he swallowed his own heartbeat: grew up in a house where everything he knew about himself had to be wrong. And he fell in love with a shipwrecked clutter of a heart pulled up from the mud, and that bad memory, bent beak, black eye of a boy, he had it for him bad, but he fell in love so good. His is the story of a boy with a home like quicksand. A boy with a papa who loved him well but a papa who loved him bad. Broken home, broken heart boy went looking for love in all the hands he knew could hurt him, because he thought that’s what love actually meant. They say we all go chasing the ghosts of our fathers, and this boy, he chased with the worst of the best. Hard knocks, hard head, hard liquor boy. He fell in the love with an angel the next street over: the one everyone called a girl, but he knew better, he loved that boy all the way down to the parts nobody else knew how to love right. He loved that brittle boned, round faced, beauty of a boy— he loved him right. And they were always one flash flood from falling over, a city on its way into the sea, beaten up by the storm off the coastline—a hurricane through the thresholds of their interwoven fingers, love in the sea-sick belly of the beast. They were clasped hands and timid hearts and skinned knees. Life isn’t kind to two boys caught up in dreaming, it doesn’t kiss like lovers at the starting line, but for all their bruised heart, broken arm, split lipped kind of hoping, they held each other like the eye of the storm passing over the rockiest part of the beach. This is the story of two boys in love, who set off for the far corners of the sunset, and ran the rails with the sound of the train at their backs. They’ve never loved like people who could afford to take chances. They love like outlaws on the run, like comets out of orbit, like the lit cherry on the end of a cigarette. They love like they have to. Like they’ve got nothing left. And for them, that’s enough. For them— that’s the best they’ve ever had.

BEC AND HIS BOY by Ashe Vernon, from Belly of the Beast (available for purchase, here)

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When they talk about the tortured genius, somebody always brings up Van Gogh— how he swallowed yellow paint because he wanted to put the sunshine inside himself. How his psychosis was probably the result of lead poisoning. They call him a miracle, but what I see is a man who was so sad, he found a beautiful way to kill himself.   They say, “it’s awful isn’t it?” They say, “It’s always the talented ones who go before their time.” And me, a nine year old kid who’s always been told they were so talented wonders when I am going to die.   We study them in school, the tortured artists. Look at all the poets who killed themselves what would their work have been without their depression? It’s it beautiful, isn’t it sad? As if depression is a parlor trick— pull it out at parties, impress all your friends. As if depression isn’t seeing how long you can go between showers before somebody notices or pizza rolls for dinner three nights in a row and then nothing the night after, because going to the store is an impossibility that you have not yet gathered the courage to conquer.   It is the least beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and we call it the mark of an artist to stand in the center of an ocean and see nothing but desert. To be seated at a feast, but still swallowing sand.   Depression is the yellow paint, the yellow paint, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT—   Art is a coping mechanism. Van Gogh is good because when he had nothing, he had paint. When he was empty, he had paint. When the world was awful, he had paint. When he hated himself, he didn’t hate the paint. He whitewashed over his own masterpieces, because it was never about being famous, it was about doing the one thing that made sense when everything else didn’t.   And they say, “without his illness, we never would have gotten all—this.” because they value his art more than his sanity because god forbid you lead a happy life and leave nothing to remember you by.

VINCENT, by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)

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After an entire relationship spent confusing love for suicide, he breaks up with me and for the first time in months I do not want to die.

Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)

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