The Common Room
Poetry | Essays | Photography
The Quiet of an Inner Life
The Hours, Days, Years
The Forgiving Night
No mortal love has asked of me so much;
it breaks me into form.
O art, my sin.
Marni Fraser
10.09.2026
IV:00 A.M.
Food…
It refused to be breakfast.
It refused to be pie.
It refused so completely
it forgot not to die.
Endings
This is the promise:
hesitant,
half-whispered,
never rescinded.
To Run
What causes the sudden change
from green
to the tarnish of spoons?
The Lie Of Pure Blood
Culture and history are important. Ethnicity and family matter. None of it establishes human rank or worth.
The Bone Orchard
So much carried
before knowing its name.
So much buried—
that still knew me.
Changed
And I,
still visible,
wave back.
The Sunny Days
The insects come and praise what they see,
oh how drunk on the short-lived velvet of her.
She likes their little hymns and lets them hover,
but praise is just sunshine with a tongue;
it stays awhile, then goes off somewhere else.
Nature
We praise the flower standing alone,
call her strong when nobody brings light.
Somewhere beneath the praise, she thirsts.
No living thing was made to earn its tending,
nor beauty meant to function as a ransom.
A Clean Margin
Enough of the half-truths,
and of the missing truth.
Enough of it arriving barefoot,
then three days late to boot,
and with blood on its feet.
The Months Around It
Perhaps that is where the distinction between language and action becomes most useful. Words are not meaningless. They can be extraordinary, and they can cross years, countries and circumstances in ways that very little else can. They can alter the course of a life. They can also describe a relationship more beautifully than the relationship is actually being lived.
What?
Or was it only your throat, speaking a language it hadn’t been given yet?
The Violence of Belonging
Call it what it is — grave robbery, not inheritance. And it should disgust you exactly as much as the Klan does — not because the two have inflicted equal damage on the world, they plainly have not, but because the thing underneath both of them is identical: a belief that a person's worth, loyalty, and right to belong can be settled by looking at their blood. Scale tells you how much harm an idea has managed to do. It doesn't tell you whether the idea is rotten. This one is rotten no matter how small the group holding it is.
I Swear
Truth of companionship.
The Discipline of Leaving
If something doesn’t work, change it. If a place doesn’t work, leave it. If a person consistently brings dishonesty, misery, or disrespect into your life, move on.
Lost
Sometimes
the natural world, indifferent and immense;
the sea not needing to know my depths,
the trees seasonally meeting with death,
the creatures innocent of our despair.
The Second Straw
And across the ground
lie all the things
once mistaken
for belonging.