Issue 22
Winter 2020
[So you try to remake a life]
Renée Ashley
[So you try to remake a life] after what you’ve been told:
Not one word signified. A word is a sound is a sign
denoting nothing. Would you want more of that same?
You’d say lonely if it had meaning. You’d say done.
Instead you think: I’ll absorb this. I’ll tender that. I’ll keep slogging on.
If we could read minds, there’d be no thing at all called love.
The fires fly up in you like birds burning.
Each one amazes you. Each one is the first one.
No music can be heard above those flames.
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.