POEM: Conversion Until Dead

Conversion Until Dead

By now I have let much dissolve at the periphery —

the body taut, sinew coiled and folded back on itself,

hands that once reached for leather and flesh,

hips that danced until the salt came through —

then fucked,

and came again.

I surrendered the boots. The whips.

Declared a husband among the dead.

Dismissed the lovers, one by one,

like candles snuffed between two fingers.

And took instead one —

slender, bristled, born to my grip,

fixed to the hinge of my shoulder,

carrying five luminous faces,

one for each finger that holds him.

He presses his belly to the stretched white body

of the one I truly want —

and I am between them always,

the necessary middle,

the one who makes the meeting possible.

All night I work him against that taut expanse,

pigment opening like a mouth,

the wood-pressed departure of each stroke

leaving its ghost in the surface —

evidence of arrival and leave-taking

in the same gesture.

I can turn the world any color I want.

It’s in the flick of my wrist.

In what gets me hot —

and I allow it in.

Deep.

Deep.

I allow it fully.

I allow it every day

until they carry me horizontal

and lay me to fuck the Earth.

But I won’t have this one go useless in my hand —

won’t let the mind go first,

the imagination thinning to gauze,

the wrist losing its grammar.

I will end it myself —

before the brush grows strange to me,

before the canvas stops answering,

before my own heartbreak

finishes what it started.

By my own hand.

As it has always been.

Marni Fraser

0426.2026

Detail by m.c.f.

Watercolor and graphite. Sterling Silver.