SEPTEMBER 2007

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The Beautiful Girl is Disturbed

by Renée Ashley

She nods to the one who is watching, cannot see
him, nods so he can see. (She’s broken her foot, she’s

had a small stroke, she is on the verge of her own
abandonment.) He wants the skin from her arms, from

her back. He wants the birds that speak from her mouth.
(He is testing the serious thunder between her legs, her

aureole of sunlight, her perpetual hour. He is translating
her body into the world.) She is in line for the first

lamentations. He says each of your tongues is a vessel
of unkindness, but speak, speak — they are your own

your native. (He makes her trout leap, knows the wet
language; he thinks she is the bad dog, like a bad dog

stay.) She is receding. Or what she sees is receding.
(Bone, the body and its confirmations.) It comes to her

on the petals of her sleep: a sun rises like a winged thing
lifting. That she has no wings. That she too must fly.

Previously published in Pleiades and collected in The Museum of Lost Wings

Renée Ashley

Renée Ashley is the author of three volumes of poetry: Salt, Brittingham Prize in Poetry, The Various Reasons of Light, The Revisionist’s Dream, and a chapbook, The Museum of Lost Wings, as well as a novel, Someplace Like This. She has received fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is a contributing editor to The Literary Review, and is on the faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her essay “Writing on the Brink: Peripheral Vision and the Personal Essay” will appear in the May/Summer issue of AWP’s Writer’s Chronicle. RENÉE ASHLEY IN THIS EDITION: SPOTLIGHT: A Voice Answering a Voice — A Conversation with Renée Ashley POEM: The Beautiful Girl is Disturbed POEM: What She Wanted POEM: Why I Never Came (Apology to My Mother)