Poem: Inventory Of A Throat
Inventory of A Throat
Goodbye California with shackled ring like impending doom,
then New Mexico opened its mouth under the wide motel night—
and his hands decided the rules and the border.
In a tilting room the future went dim,
and my name was a light he could shut off.
After that, the years were installments of pressure:
the blunt punctuation of a fist or boot—
the kiss of knuckles to skull,
the cloudy and raining weather of his voice, the daily grinding-down of pride and solitude.
So thankful for his second life, a hidden room with a woman inside a hallway -
I was a blindfolded statue.
Some nights the bound phone, the bound computer—
the long murder of hours—
girlfriends like a ceremony,
my song with the world locked into silence.
I don’t miss that circle—
nor the tree that grew thorns for its thirsty blood,
nor the laughing in the shadow it would cast.
Maybe a few good hours?
Then I remember the sand in my teeth.
I fled the country.
Sweden’s cold light, and clean streets—
even there a single strike
—a stamp on a passport I never sought.
—a public dumping with my face on the bid.
Back home, a man with cocaine glamour and police-heat,
a slipping into my life as if it were optional,
same kind of thorn raising its temper like a prick as “honest.”
When as a bitch I set out to go, he used the law as a leash—
sent officers to my door with my name in their hands,
asking if I planned to die,
as though my exit were an illness.
Stunned alive in my body,
they saw me with pity,
even they smelled the lie he’d thrown in the air—
and they knew the why of a bitch taking to the street.
Later, loneliness arrived wearing a clerical collar
—a minister of hymn-breath, and practiced mercy
with a census of thirty-five female shadows,
and I was one number in his private arithmetic.
When I knew I left, and a year later one of the others called—wounded, unraveling—
and the damage kept echoing, a bell that wouldn’t quit.
I resented such fucked ringing.
Then the art offer: a price tag talking kindly.
“If I buy your work, I will manage you.”
I gave myself away on canvas.
Then the gun-photographs—
metal at his temple,
pity as threat.
“I didn’t mean manage.”
More guns.
A marriage split open,
children ricocheting through hospitals,
a house full of sirens
that were not mine to answer.
Pity I must go.
I am not your friend—
(poor artist to manage.)
And after that I went —
I, the locked room with the lights low
I, a reflex, made from the answers I ate.
Oh that deep and dark,
and most hidden inventory of bruised body and bonds,
like a private atlas of roads where love was rationed.
If I sound calm, it’s the calm calamity of survival.
See me, I’m exact, I’ve records in the marrow.
Now I’m saying it with fearless nouns,
and something in me shaking, fierce—
a heavenly gate lifting a long locked hinge that’s giving way—
as if the throat I saved from another’s hands all those years,
finally decided to burn in full sentences.
Marni Fraser
2026
Inventory Of A Throat by Marni Fraser
