Poetry by McKenna Ashlyn

      Michael Nugent CC




Inheritance

I’m on my tip-toes, pulling my brothers’ curtains closed. 
Wrench my blinds open to see the driveway. Beyond my windowsill’s 
dead dynasty of flies, I watch my parents’ bodies yanked 
by invisible strings. Spitting yells punctuated by sun. Crept my window 
open like they could hear me from their wasp nest,

but Dad is already in the car. And Mom is hung 
like a crooked family portrait on the handle, refusing to let go.
Like her father and grandfather, she wanted an early exit.
I’m skipping stairs. My bare feet hobble across the summer stove, 
loose rocks stuck into me. And Mom, roadkill, 

glistening ruby on melting tar. Perfume of Coors Light 
and hairspray tinged iron-sweet. I think, just for a second, 
if I escape inside nothing will have happened. 
But instead I push her body over to find a child crying. 
That’s when I become mother.

I’m too afraid to ask the question. 
She slices through her plan, her failed suicide attempt caught and foiled.
Dad absconded. My trembling hands above first aid kit,
I hear the noose of the bathroom door close, and the gasp of its lock.
I think that’s when the tears came. 

I’m beating the door raw and my phone started ringing 
and I couldn’t answer. Or maybe I did 
and it was an apology. My little brothers pacing 
the staircase, sirens shrieking.  
Please, please, healing is my inheritance.

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Girl-halved

I loved her. Limp brown hair. Crooked nose. Snuck out to poetry 
slams & suddenly it was more than zipper-busted backpacks piled 

in the backseat. Subaru shipwrecked. Stranded. Watched breath cloud 
cold. Lamplit street. She sat center stage. Laid out repressed memories 

of a child. Fogged & unsure – but it was a man & he was a villain. 
Is that too cliche? My barren bedroom. Futon mattress on musty carpet.
 
Stray cat at eighteen. My mother tried her hand at dying. Bottles & blade 
at father’s gravestone. Didn’t know if I was supposed to leave 

the blood stains or what? But this wasn’t about me. I unfolded into 
what a mother must be – small, sad, false. Our girlhood was inventoried 

hysteria. Smoked out a soda can then. Cut my thumb on the aluminum. 
She licked it clean. Weed from her older brother caught lying 

about his age to girls. Prison, she told him. You’ll go to prison.
When my girlfriend told me she’d found god. (praise the lord! straight again! 

could no longer love me! & it was a miracle!) We talked for three days 
straight until saliva crusted the mouth. She took my head in her lap. 

Dried those tear ducts with a pink hairdryer held to the face. 
She will never love you like I do, she’d say. 

I hate it here too, she’d say. After first-boyfriend helped her curate a gift 
of herself. She sat me down on a flannel-sheeted bed. Held my hands 

in hers. Demanded I read her mind. I told her I couldn’t. She began crying 
I’ll let you remember her as nothing-kingdom as long as you trace the scars 

that made me half woman half windchime. Between us there's a thread 
pulled taut. Remember? She flattened against me that fragmented night. 

It smelt of river water. She performed pleasure like a forever-splinter.
So cruel, I hate her for it.




​McKenna Ashlyn (she/they) is a poet from Boise, Idaho currently residing in Chicago, Illinois. She received her BFA in Creative Writing at Boise State University. They have been published in The Afterpast Review, Free the Verse, Down in the Dirt Magazine, among others. You can find them @mckenna.ashlyn on Instagram.
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