Healer

A psychic once took me by the body, my whole body, and sat me down, called me “healer,” told me I could heal with my hands. We sat by the ocean in Key West. It was about to rain. She said I could have babies if I chose, even get married. I wanted to believe her. Back then, at eighteen, I hadn’t menstruated in two years. I wasn’t planning on bleeding, either. Bones were more important. But this woman, she said I could heal with my hands. The thought of touching another made me flinch. I wanted to love this woman who told me I could heal. Years would pass and I’d want to love other women, too, but it wouldn’t work. The psychic wouldn’t tell me this. Instead, she stood to leave. I paid her, and night settled.

Years later, at twenty-three and on my period, I went to some trendy bar and there was a by-donation psychic. I donated, put my beer in a corner, sat down. She took my hands, placed them palm up. You have lost everything, she said, and will only fall in love if you allow it. I wanted to tell her I haven’t loved a lover in my whole life, and I wasn’t planning on it.

I wanted to tell her how bitter I was, the choice I made to exist on the outskirts of another
woman’s life.

But I didn’t tell her. There were others waiting, and my friends were asking me to dance.

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This selection comes from The Way Home, available from The Dancing Girl Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Ashley Inguanta is a poet and art photographer whose work often focuses on romantic love, the spirit, landscape, and place. Most recently, you can find her poems in Contrary Magazine, The Santa Fe Literary Review, and The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. Her newest short collection of poetry, The Island, The Mountain, and the Nightblooming Field is forthcoming in May of 2020. You can learn more about Ashley’s poetry, art, and teaching at ashleyinguanta.net.

Shells

I remember getting this hard feeling in my chest when I looked at the woman, as if my whole body would collapse. I wanted to kiss the woman, but those rocks in my chest. I couldn’t move.

When I started losing weight, it felt exciting.

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This selection comes from The Way Home, available from The Dancing Girl Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Ashley Inguanta is a poet and art photographer whose work often focuses on romantic love, the spirit, landscape, and place. Most recently, you can find her poems in Contrary Magazine, The Santa Fe Literary Review, and The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. Her newest short collection of poetry, The Island, The Mountain, and the Nightblooming Field is forthcoming in May of 2020. You can learn more about Ashley’s poetry, art, and teaching at ashleyinguanta.net.

Just a Bunch of Muse Girls Hanging Out in the Desert

Pack-Ratting

This week, I’ve been flirting with one boy and two girls. The boy is cherry pie. The girls, they are ponies, death metal. I tell the boy my dreams. Steel Pier in flames, swallowing Jupiter. The girls and I go swimming naked in the sea, waves metallic in the cat-hair dusk. I want this to last forever. I want to dance in the street—traffic lights glowing like angels in the oiled, wet road.

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This selection comes from The Way Home, available from The Dancing Girl Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Ashley Inguanta is a poet and art photographer whose work often focuses on romantic love, the spirit, landscape, and place. Most recently, you can find her poems in Contrary Magazine, The Santa Fe Literary Review, and The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. Her newest short collection of poetry, The Island, The Mountain, and the Nightblooming Field is forthcoming in May of 2020. You can learn more about Ashley’s poetry, art, and teaching at ashleyinguanta.net.

Clay and Anchor

You shed your skin this morning and left it on my plate, next to the grapefruit I sliced and salted
for breakfast. Then I yanked my teeth out, one by one, and placed them on the table next to your
fork, fixed you eggs over-easy while you buttoned up your work shirt. You looked like a new
woman, standing beside the kitchen window, touching yourself, becoming all fingertips and
cloth, weaving, reconstructing each grain of light coming through from the outside. We both
sang a song with no name. I called you Clay and Anchor and you called me Clementine and what
was done was done.

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This selection comes from The Way Home, available from The Dancing Girl Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Ashley Inguanta is a poet and art photographer whose work often focuses on romantic love, the spirit, landscape, and place. Most recently, you can find her poems in Contrary Magazine, The Santa Fe Literary Review, and The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. Her newest short collection of poetry, The Island, The Mountain, and the Nightblooming Field is forthcoming in May of 2020. You can learn more about Ashley’s poetry, art, and teaching at ashleyinguanta.net.

Peaks

Girl slept for a thousand years, cradled in an ocean of ghost horses, their legs and necks
wrapping her like mothers would children. Sometimes the ghost-horse legs wrapped girl like
rope, tying up her limbs, all wet with salt from the sea. Sometimes the ghost-horse necks
spooned girl tight, only to uncurl once again, flinging her still-sleeping body into the next wave
of mane, of tail. Sometimes the ghost horses ached when they let girl go. Sometimes the ghost
horses could not wait to get her gone.

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This selection comes from The Way Home, available from The Dancing Girl Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Nilsa Rivera.

Ashley Inguanta is a poet and art photographer whose work often focuses on romantic love, the spirit, landscape, and place. Most recently, you can find her poems in Contrary Magazine, The Santa Fe Literary Review, and The Familiar Wild: On Dogs & Poetry. Her newest short collection of poetry, The Island, The Mountain, and the Nightblooming Field is forthcoming in May of 2020. You can learn more about Ashley’s poetry, art, and teaching at ashleyinguanta.net.