Bebe Ashley - A selection of poems

Dinner Party

Mum thinks I’m asking for the langoustines mais j’explique que je travaille en langue des signes.

Let's Sign Science

For a visual poetry class, I am photocopying pages from let ' s sign science: bsl vocabulary from an old series of print publications that also includes let's sign feelings and emotions.

I would like to find let's sign pop culture or let's sign in the museum but they don’t exist and I can’t afford a graphics tablet or a year of fine-line art classes to learn to draw the graphics packages myself.

I cut out cool collage combinations like untamed magnetic attraction or caterpillar camouflage. Something is missing but these are all the words I have. I arrange the language and it falls flat on the page.

Glass Ceilings

Katherine Johnson 1918–2020

I am facilitating my first workshop for the Science Festival, on mathematical and scientific approaches to poetry.

In preparation, I am listening to the podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon, to the bonus episode with Hans Zimmer on the making of music.

He says, loneliness does not have a sound in space but you have to describe the silence.

I am late to the news and find the obituary online then, the letter of a reader mourning the mathematician

who shattered expectations of spaceflight trajectories who calculated and computed a safe return home.

I want to know what it felt like to be one-hundred-and-one and to greet the glass ceiling for a second time.

Brass and Pearl

The showman was head down and full of hay fever when he heard about the man whose wife played cello

who sometimes had a cello full of honeycomb and bees who sometimes played the cello full of honeycomb and bees

because she liked the way the vibration changed and everybody knows the bees are disappearing

but not that there aren’t enough hollow trees left here for them to find their own homes.

The showman smiled only to himself when he caught in the periphery of the shop window

a revelation both perfect and incomplete: a gold honeybee earring with a glass drop pearl.