On Loving an Atheist
by Ashley Polley

Your graceless death left me to hold

Nothing but iron and bone between my sheets.

They say I will forgive you one day. But the ache

Of your skeleton and the clean breaks in your rib

Cage tell me of your delight in these deaths.

 

I had lined this ladder to our godless heaven

With the stems of African violets and the intestines

Of former lovers. I was the black widow. You were

Salvation’s wet dream—starlit souls have died

Before in history to worship your kind. I refuse

 

To become a martyr by your name. For I once posed

Nude in lavish fury for you. You told me the beauty

I evoked did not even decay in the Death Rattle

Of the oldest of dreams. And so you photographed

Me with your mind—captured my pornographic eyes

 

And my breasts of a child. I hope you have

Humbert Humbert’s clarity with still frame and stop

Motion. And I pray to genitals that rise from the holy dead

That you do not remember me as an Annabelle—that distilled

Faint static on the television screen of the mind.

 

I want to be Lolita. To haunt your headboard and shipwreck

Your dreams. Make you moan for that bitch of a mother as the ghost

Of me captures your falling teeth—painted in gasoline, and holding your rosary

With the electrical wire of my hands—memories of us before time

Had an arrow. I am the black widow. And I’ll make you believe. Remember,

 

Darling, I do not worship anyone. They say I will forgive you. One day.

 

ASHLEY POLLEY, after years of worshipping Kerouac’s On the Road, spent 2009 as an interstate-exit junkie. From seeing every star charted in the night sky of Austin, Minnesota, to aligning her heartbeat to the pulse of San Antonio, Texas, Ashley gained experience that aided in writing her newest poems. She is a sophomore in college thanks to accredited on-line courses, and was published in the 2007 anthology of high school poets by the Live Poet’s Society of New Jersey, as well as in the San Antonio–based literary journal Dreamcatcher. Ashley resides in San Antonio but already has plans to hit the road again. After a brief run-in with the nation’s capitol, she has decided to return back east in hopes of attending the University of Mary Washington.

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