Tag Archives: Ashley Halm

Her Name Was Summer

I beg you, take the violets from the jar when you leave this time

I cannot winter this hurt that nests in my shoulder blades

I cannot ignore the shame and the tricks it teaches

I’m tired of all this blind metaphor making

and sitting at the kitchen table

holding onto this knife like it will rescue me

I beg you, when you leave this time

take it all with you so I can’t wonder where you went

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Ashley Halm is a senior at SUNY Fredonia, double majoring in theater arts and English, with a minor in creative writing. Originally from Corning, New York, Ashley plans to work as a substitute teacher and pursue an MFA degree in fiction writing after graduation. When she’s not writing, she enjoys reading, hiking, and spending time with her beautiful, brilliant friends.

Confession

And in the cold gray hours before the sun rose, you would tell me stories about being a kid on the farm in Vermont. Your dad made you kill a chicken when you were eight, made you grip its soft shaking body between skinned knees and cut its throat with a little splitting hatchet.

On your thirteenth birthday, he dropped you off at the clinic in the city and told his brother not to come home for Thanksgiving that year. You got kicked out of your junior prom because you held a boy’s own blade against his neck.

Hold it steady with your knees, your dad said. Use your hips to balance. Don’t take your hand off its chest. Hit it cleanly, not too slow, not too fast, so you go all the way through the first time. Don’t flinch at the blood. It can’t feel anything, so neither can you. Throw sawdust on the mess when you’re done. No one’s gonna clean it up for you.

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Ashley Halm is a senior at SUNY Fredonia, double majoring in theater arts and English, with a minor in creative writing. Originally from Corning, New York, Ashley plans to work as a substitute teacher and pursue an MFA degree in fiction writing after graduation. When she’s not writing, she enjoys reading, hiking, and spending time with her beautiful, brilliant friends.

Ode to a Cowboy

You insist you’d rather be a ghost

Wandering untethered from one place to the next

And I think maybe I used to believe that too.

But I also think that people can be resting places

Soft spots to land, to hang up your hat

And be washed of the day’s dust.

A soft spot can be hard to show

Because that’s where the arrows find you

And leave you with scars that sparkle like spurs.

In the five o clock shadows and seven o clock sunsets

We lend the pieces of ourselves we can afford to lose

Until we are tangled together like so many old reins.

I think if there is a god

He makes cowboys two of a kind

And scatters them over the desert in the hot sand.

The chances of finding each other

Before the animals do are slim

But maybe this is the oasis.

 

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Ashley Halm (she/they) is a senior at SUNY Fredonia double majoring in theater arts and English with a minor in creative writing. Originally from Corning, New York, Ashley’s writing interests include poetry, flash fiction, and playwriting. In her sparse spare time, she enjoys cooking, making art, and reading.

Apocalypse Song

I remember the day the world ended

I woke up in a lake of my own creation

the birds outside were squawking their

travel itineraries over their shoulders

as they swept off toward Eden or the Arctic Circle

we put on our sparkliest prom dresses

swarmed out onto the already scorched grass

marveled at how quickly summer had jumped on us in the

middle of winter and turned our cheeks pink like raspberries

we kissed and spun each other around in tight dizzy circles like figure skaters

we sped through traffic lights stuck on green in a

hot wired pickup truck and let our taffeta skirts

pillow out behind us like parachutes

we ransacked all the gas stations in town for beer and popsicles

before they had the chance to melt

didn’t bother looking for supplies because the grown-ups had

taken it all and left us for garden fertilizer

when the truck ran out of gas we smacked at the corroding asphalt with

bare feet until we were sticky and black up to our ankles

we rode past the Mona Lisa on skateboards with

cans of neon yellow spray paint and graphed the

trajectories of our short lives in hearts and

stars on every brick wall we found still standing

and at the end of the day, we dragged ourselves to the beach and

watched a radioactive orange sun plop itself

down on the ocean like an egg yolk

and when it disappeared under that thick green line we realized

that the sun was too heavy to bring itself back up

so we dove down deep into the water with it

our lungs and bellies filled with steam and pure hydrogen

and we dove to the place where the green water turns into

green forests turn into a starless black sky

we came to rest like pine needles on the soft floor

and exploded into supernovas so that the new people

would have some light to find their way

out, back to the stinging surface

maybe centuries from now they will emerge from that coral underworld

and their seaweed hair will dry and crack in the electric air

they will find crunched cans and the remains of tiny bonfires lit from popsicle sticks

scattered on the sand like the clothes left on the floors of our bedrooms

and maybe they will wonder about the childish tantrums of their ancestors

the ones they found calcified into statues on a sandbar not even a hundred feet off the coast

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Ashley Halm is a junior at SUNY Fredonia double majoring in theatre arts and English with a minor in creative writing. Originally from Corning, New York, Ashley’s writing interests include poetry, flash fiction, and playwriting. In her sparse spare time, she enjoys cooking, making art, and reading.