A Little Bit of Poetry is a place where we share some of our poems accessibly to all. Scroll down for a list of published poems and their links. To learn more about our poetry or to commission or license a work, please email us at: poems@ashleymabbitt.com.

Ashley Mabbitt’s first book of poetry, A Self, a Frame, a Look in Through, is now available from Kelsay Books and from Amazon. Three poems from the book are included below.

“Reading Ashley Mabbitt’s gleaming debut collection, A Self, a Frame, a Look in Through, is like gazing at a Vermeer—and wondering how the artist did it. With her stealth brilliance, she seems to have composed these poems as if she’s quietly placed the clamor of lived life into a camera obscura. In Mabbitt’s hands, tangled experiences of love and disconnection, of history and personal history, of objects and rooms, come to reveal moving, poignant, warmly lit souls. While light angles and shadows underpin, the lines of her poems sort the ambiguities of modern life with hushed understanding and an amused view of the self. A Self, a Frame, a Look in Through is a radiant debut.”


—Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst: Poems

  • My Ideal Self as a Small, Oval Mirror Framed in Gold

    Whatever passes before me, it belongs,

    and I hold it within my frame, lightly,

    until it should pass away again.

    I have no corners, no narrowed places

    where shadows might hide.

    I do not break and then continue,

    I just continue. As the sky is cornerless

    and holds its place while sun, moon, clouds, smog, and stars

    lay their tracks and route trains across

    its fields: my visitors are fewer in variety

    than the sky’s, but even for me,

    in early spring, great flocks of migrating birds cross my surface.

    —Ashley Mabbitt

  • Equerry

    The brush of a clean, wet pair

    of pantyhose, falling from a wooden

    drying rack onto the top of your foot

    as you stand before your bathroom mirror,

    taking care to coat your smallest lashes,

    the ones in the corners of each eye,

    with your wand of mascara — you sense them landing

    but wait to look full-on at what is there.

    Whereas the brush of a young princess’ fingertips

    releasing a thimble of fluff from the tunicked shoulder

    of a married man (decades older), was small,

    but cupped in the palms of so many watchers’ eyes.

    —Ashley Mabbitt

  • The Coyote’s Howl

    An echo is proof of some(one’s) reluctance to let go:

    canyon walls quarter-inching the long minute hand

    back far enough to revisit the coyote’s howl or woodpecker’s tap.

    An echo is evidence of what we cannot easily let go,

    and not just beauty, but also the phone call hastily made

    to give advice, unwelcomed as ever, met with an auto-pilot retort.

    An echo tells us there is something someone hesitates to let go:

    canyon walls and adult siblings; spacious birdsong and arguments never won.

    —Ashley Mabbitt

More of Ashley Mabbitt’s poems can be read in such literary journals as The Ekphrastic Review, Emerge, Plume, Ravensperch, South Florida Poetry Journal, and The Summerset Review. A sampling of recent work is offered in the links here.