HARVARD GIRL
by Ashley Ording

She wanted me to go
to Harvard. "You could meet
a nice Harvard boy,
and I wouldn't have to worry
about
you taking care of yourself,"
she said.
But at Harvard,
you can't paint skies
out of the box. You can't
create chaos from
color
and scream at the stars
that burn angrily in their cages.
She wanted me
to solve equations and
marry logic in a pure
white dress.
But I wanted acrylics
on my hands
and stretched cavases
and scissors to cut up
textbooks.
She wanted me to
befriend the enemies
which had once
kept me up at night.
"I want you to be
a Harvard girl,"
she said.
And I just laughed
      and kept painting.

THE QUITE PARTS
by Ashley Ording

wednesday is here and i am still digging through
my coat pockets for
the words i scrawled on a paper towel,
the letters that spelled Change and Beginning.
i suppose that
is where all of us are hovering.
but my fingers
can't reach in that far. i've been letting them
   glide
 over the tops of freshly lined paper
 with the blue ink still burning
but i cannot penetrate my own audience.
         sometimes i feel lost
      in the language of mass cultures
      and in the surrounding heart beat of
      people i've never met.
i only want to touch something
inside your chest or on the small of the back,
and carve there
 some kind of legitimacy.
i want you to pretend that
the small things matter when i enlarge them like this.
i still don't have the words to
describe being infinite, or the discipline
to pick out individual instruments
from a song. from the very first note
they crash together like bodies dancing
  to form a single period
   at the end of a life-long sentence.
the songs are all the same
with a beginning and an end,
except for the hushed secrets
            that live in the quiet parts.
            the silence between falling down
               and getting back up again.