SALLY ASHTON

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Form is the opposite of dream,​​

Bachelard wrote. I dreamed I could look straight through one of my ears and out the other, like looking down a well-lit hallway into another room. I saw this in the mirror. I know what that means. I wasn’t afraid, perhaps alarmed, but I felt I was discovering something true about myself that couldn’t be seen another way, like a butterfly pinned to a board, its wings spread open—there the head, thorax, abdomen, its six segmented legs, stiffened, carefully arranged.  Like that, except the opposite.

Sally Ashton is a poet, writer, teacher, and editor in chief of DMQ Review. Author of five books including most recently Listening to Mars, she specializes in brief forms across genres. Her poem “4.6 Billion Years” is now archived on the Moon. A book of personal essays exploring a personal practice and the race to space, Going to the Moon, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

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