“A Change" and "Safe Sex" by Elizabeth Ashe

A Change

Your pillow marked the difference
on my bed. Roses on wine, all summer.
You slept beside me three nights a week –
enough to keep a trace of clover
and wild roses and leave
a shadow forest in your absence.

I'd come to talk to your pillow
the nights without you, let poems slip
and hang in air
where your eyes didn't rest to drink them.

On the nights you were here
we would hold hands, yours matching mine
only narrower, anxious roots.
We told stories at night after kisses
as if our lips were truffles,
about a wizard who turned everything
magenta, turned stones into doves
and enchanted a horse.

Keats knew, the way cats do.
He approved, preferred your vacated pillow
to his routine curl around my hip.

It wasn't until three weeks without you –
after I rubbed your sob-filled back on a friend's wicker couch
because you weren't ready to be with me –
that I could move your pillow off my bed.
Keats' fur had overtaken the roses,
clover and vine-tangled hair by then.

Beside my pillow,
I've dumped the contents of two purses
and one travel bag, looking for you.
Instead, Marilyn Hacker and a journal
ridicule me.

---

Safe Sex

I picked up a dental dam
from the wicker basket in the campus health center.
The '80s color label too ridiculous
to leave alone. Vanilla and mint flavored –
still, I didn't know what to expect.
For one, I didn't think it would be
large enough to be a tourniquet.
And two, I didn't know it'd be blue
or smell like a kitchen, a baked good or cup of tea.
It's a dead balloon, containing nothing.
Women aren't simple.
And I want to taste my girlfriend,
know the current of her skin
against the sheets or glass of water.
She stormed me against the wall this morning
when I came home with sugar packets
from the coffee shop, to make her pancakes.
I'd rather taste her
than something I hadn't made from scratch.
I'd rather not be safe from intimacy.

---

5/20/2025

Elizabeth Ashe is a multidisciplinary artist. She earned her poetry MFA from Chatham University. Her writing has recently appeared in Art Lantern, Bourgeon, and Tribes. She has received multiple grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities to support her studio practice. Ashe lives in Washington, DC, and works at the Katzen Arts Center.