Ashley Cline
An avid introvert, full-time carbon-based life-form and aspiring himbo, Ashley Cline (she/her) crash-landed in south Jersey some time ago, and still calls that strange land home. A Best of the Net 2020 finalist, her poetry has appeared in 404 Ink, Okay Donkey, perhappened mag, Parentheses Journal, and HAD--among others. Her debut chapbook, "& watch how easily the jaw sings of god," is available now (Glass Poetry Press, 2021), while her second and third, "should the earth reclaim you" (Bone & Ink Press) and "cowabungaly yours at the end of the world" (Gutslut Press), are forthcoming. Once, in the summer of 2019, she crowd-surfed an inflatable sword to Carly Rae Jepsen, and her best at all-you-can-eat sushi is 5 rolls in 11 minutes. She is much too Online for her own good. Twitter: @the_Cline. Instagram: @clineclinecline. Linktree: @ashleycline.
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yellow bruise, in F# Major (god bless Carly Rae Jepsen)
i think about the way Carly Rae Jepsen sings run away with me / three minutes & forty-nine seconds into the song / of the very same name / more often than i think / of more important things / like, i already know that the planet is dying, for example / know how she is burning herself alive / for a lover who calls her nothing / calls her maybe / calls her venus, redux / & only Carly Rae Jepsen understands, this / what it is to spin on an axis of want / knows that you can’t fake passion / like pleading / like burning / like the way she sings run away with me / near the edge of that final chorus / the way she extends that one me in particular / until it hangs shimmering like caramel lovers / unspooling their legs from / the split lips of diner-booth vinyl / sticky & sweet from the flush of an august heat / knows that you can’t pull it from yourself no matter how hard you try / the heat, i mean / & knows that to be in love is a culmination of the body, humid / the way it clings to your skin like a bramble, feral / like pressing a finger into a bruise on purpose & watching the sky drape herself in something softer than violence / knows that this is a love language, too / the body, i mean / & leans in, anyway.
Commentary
Ashley on “yellow bruise, in F# Major (god bless Carly Rae Jepsen)”:
There’s something so unassuming about pop music. The way its thesis is laid bare by the first chorus. The way it so often asks for what it wants, so plainly. The way it believes in a world where love—and by nature, heartbreak; though that is a poem for another day—is a force as real and as pressing as gravity. And no one writes this kind of pop music—the one least afraid to be vulnerable—better than Carly Rae Jepsen.
It’s this vulnerability—so sincere that it pushes at its own boundaries; pulsing like an ache or stretching like a note that knows the closing chorus will wait for it—that I most admire, not just in music or in poetry or in storytelling, but in general. I look for it in everything.
Poetry can be so many things—a long list I won’t even try and tally up, here—but for me, my favorite poems—the ones that grab me gently, but urgently—read much like a good pop song plays. Which is not to say that they are simple or bombastic by any means, but rather that they capture honesty in a way that is remarkable: in both their tenderness, and their willingness to be tender.
When I write, all I’m ever really hoping to do is capture a crumb of that honesty; to unravel a thought, or an emotion, or a haphazard string-of-a-phrase back to a chorus that asks, so plainly: run away with me?
There are so many reasons to write: writing to make Carly Rae Jepsen proud might as well be one of them.
Assistant Editor Dia Roth on “yellow bruise, in F# Major (god bless Carly Rae Jepsen)”:
Before “yellow bruise, in F# Major (god bless Carly Rae Jepsen)” even begins, Ashley Cline drops us directly into a pool of both physical and emotional ache. We feel the lingering pain of an old bruise, the earth’s longing “for a lover who calls her nothing / calls her maybe,” and the loneliness wherein “only / Carly Rae Jepsen understands” how any of it feels.
Reading this poem threw me into a weeks-long re-listen of Carly Rae Jepsen’s EMOTION; always in the car, always at night, and always with the windows down. Despite having listened to this album’s opening track, “Run Away With Me,” many times before, I couldn’t hear in my mind the exact run away with me that she sings “three minutes & forty-nine / seconds into the song.” Now, I realize that it doesn’t actually matter if I can hear the song in my head or not; this poem shows us “the way she extends that one me in particular / until it hangs / shimmering like caramel lovers / unspooling their legs / from the split-lips of diner booth vinyl / sticky & sweet from the flush of an august heat.” Cline delivers her speaker’s experience of the song with stunning specificity, layering image, breath, and rhythm as richly as Jepsen layers harmonies.
There’s something so unassuming about pop music. The way its thesis is laid bare by the first chorus. The way it so often asks for what it wants, so plainly. The way it believes in a world where love—and by nature, heartbreak; though that is a poem for another day—is a force as real and as pressing as gravity. And no one writes this kind of pop music—the one least afraid to be vulnerable—better than Carly Rae Jepsen.
It’s this vulnerability—so sincere that it pushes at its own boundaries; pulsing like an ache or stretching like a note that knows the closing chorus will wait for it—that I most admire, not just in music or in poetry or in storytelling, but in general. I look for it in everything.
Poetry can be so many things—a long list I won’t even try and tally up, here—but for me, my favorite poems—the ones that grab me gently, but urgently—read much like a good pop song plays. Which is not to say that they are simple or bombastic by any means, but rather that they capture honesty in a way that is remarkable: in both their tenderness, and their willingness to be tender.
When I write, all I’m ever really hoping to do is capture a crumb of that honesty; to unravel a thought, or an emotion, or a haphazard string-of-a-phrase back to a chorus that asks, so plainly: run away with me?
There are so many reasons to write: writing to make Carly Rae Jepsen proud might as well be one of them.
Assistant Editor Dia Roth on “yellow bruise, in F# Major (god bless Carly Rae Jepsen)”:
Before “yellow bruise, in F# Major (god bless Carly Rae Jepsen)” even begins, Ashley Cline drops us directly into a pool of both physical and emotional ache. We feel the lingering pain of an old bruise, the earth’s longing “for a lover who calls her nothing / calls her maybe,” and the loneliness wherein “only / Carly Rae Jepsen understands” how any of it feels.
Reading this poem threw me into a weeks-long re-listen of Carly Rae Jepsen’s EMOTION; always in the car, always at night, and always with the windows down. Despite having listened to this album’s opening track, “Run Away With Me,” many times before, I couldn’t hear in my mind the exact run away with me that she sings “three minutes & forty-nine / seconds into the song.” Now, I realize that it doesn’t actually matter if I can hear the song in my head or not; this poem shows us “the way she extends that one me in particular / until it hangs / shimmering like caramel lovers / unspooling their legs / from the split-lips of diner booth vinyl / sticky & sweet from the flush of an august heat.” Cline delivers her speaker’s experience of the song with stunning specificity, layering image, breath, and rhythm as richly as Jepsen layers harmonies.