The Harmonious Self

What about harmony and what it actually means to live harmoniously with ourselves and other people? We often associate harmony with agreement, with people sharing similar beliefs or reaching conclusions that allow them to live comfortably alongside one another. But harmony involves something more substantial than agreement. I believe it’s an extension of love, and that our ability to experience it with other people has a great deal to do with the relationship we’ve established with ourselves.

When I speak about love, I’m not referring exclusively to affection, intimacy, or the relationships we develop with people who are personally important to us. I mean something that extends beyond those attachments: a genuine concern for another person’s existence, freedom, and well being, whether or not we know them, understand their circumstances, or agree with what they believe.

That kind of love cannot be separated from the way we understand ourselves. We have to be willing to sit with our own thoughts, consider our conduct, and recognize what we’re capable of tolerating. Loving ourselves isn’t simply feeling pleased with who we are. It requires an understanding of our limitations, our disappointments, and the things we may need to change. And as we develop that understanding, the love and respect we extend to others can deepen our understanding of ourselves.

Self-love and love for humanity are not competing virtues. One doesn’t become more important because it concerns ourselves, or less important because it concerns somebody else. They are expressions of the same capacity, each capable of strengthening the other. The spiritual principle of loving our neighbor as ourselves has always interested me for that reason. It suggests a relationship between the consideration we extend inward and the consideration we’re capable of extending outward. That principle doesn’t need to depend upon religious authority to possess philosophical meaning.

Perhaps this is why I find our need for agreement so troubling.

People sometimes appear confident in their convictions while remaining remarkably dependent upon the approval of others. They seek out people who think as they do, and disagreement becomes something they interpret as rejection or even hostility. I wonder how much of that dependence comes from never having developed sufficient confidence in their own understanding.

There is nothing wrong with seeking another person’s perspective or discovering that our reasoning may be flawed. We learn through intellectual exchange, and sometimes disagreement is precisely what allows us to recognize something we hadn’t previously considered. An opposing perspective can expose weaknesses in our reasoning, introduce knowledge we don’t possess, or encourage us to reconsider a conclusion we’ve accepted for years. There is a difference between examining our convictions through conversation and depending upon another person’s approval to sustain them.

Our environments contribute to this. We may grow up in families where acceptance depends upon obedience or agreement, or enter adult relationships and communities where belonging requires us to adopt opinions we haven’t independently examined. Over time, conformity can become so familiar that we begin to confuse it with harmony.

Yet genuine harmony doesn’t require us to think alike.

Two people can disagree profoundly and still possess affection, respect, and an understanding of one another. We see this in relationships where individuals have opposing beliefs but remain deeply in love. They learn what can be accepted, where compromise is possible, and which differences need not threaten the relationship itself. Their affection doesn’t depend upon resolving every disagreement, but upon recognizing that each person possesses an understanding shaped by experiences the other may never have shared.

Sometimes, however, differences become too substantial to reconcile. Harmony doesn’t require us to remain involved in relationships that continually produce conflict. There are circumstances in which the most respectful decision is to separate, allowing another person to continue living according to their own understanding without attempting to punish them for being different.

Being able to leave without deliberately causing harm may itself be an expression of love.

Tolerance also has moral boundaries. We cannot reasonably describe a society as harmonious when people are being deprived of their freedom, healthcare, food, or clean drinking water. Cruelty and oppression are not simply differences of opinion that others must learn to accept. They have consequences for human life, and our responsibility toward one another sometimes requires us to resist them.

The distinction matters because harmony should never become an excuse for indifference. Caring about humanity means recognizing that other people’s suffering concerns us, even when we have no personal relationship with them.

There is something worth considering about the ways human beings depend upon one another. Countries possess different resources, just as individuals possess different knowledge, abilities, and experiences. One may have something another needs. Cooperation becomes possible when we recognize that our differences need not prevent us from contributing to one another’s wellbeing. In fact, those differences are often what make the exchange valuable.

What troubles me is how frequently disagreement becomes hostility before people have even considered what they might learn from one another. The consequences can be devastating. We lose human lives, childhoods, freedom, and the opportunity for people to discover what they might otherwise have contributed to the world.

And I wonder how much of that could be changed by the things we teach our children.

We all develop at different rates, and no generation can guarantee that the next will become wiser or more compassionate. But there is something profoundly important about the example we establish. Children who grow up experiencing love, respect, and the freedom to think independently may carry those qualities into their own relationships. They can learn that disappointment doesn’t have to become resentment, and that disagreement doesn’t necessarily require somebody to be defeated. They may also discover, through the consideration extended to them, how to develop that same consideration within themselves.

What begins as an individual’s willingness to examine themselves can eventually influence a family, a community, and perhaps generations of people who will never know where that influence began.

I don’t imagine humanity reaching a condition in which everyone agrees or conflict disappears. Human beings are too different, and our experiences too varied, for such an expectation to be reasonable. Nor does love prevent us from exercising poor judgment or behaving in ways we may later regret.

But harmony asks something more substantial of us than agreement. It requires us to distinguish between disagreement and harm, between protecting our convictions and imposing them, and between loving somebody and needing them to become more like ourselves. We can respect another person’s existence without requiring their understanding to resemble our own.

And if we can learn to extend that consideration beyond the people we know and love personally, harmony becomes something greater than a condition we hope to experience in our own lives. It becomes something we are capable of contributing to the lives of others.

1102|2026

Marni Fraser

XI:XLI AM

1016|2026

The Dying

Death

Death, why do you come and go,

teasing the blood of an imploring soul?

Why do you linger beneath my window

like a black cloak in the autumn rain,

your pale eyes full of centuries and sins,

your mouth sweet with the last roses of September?

You came in October. I was young,

when the clocks still donned their golden faces,

and the earth was round with possibility—

every flower believed itself eternal.

You didn’t take my innocence at once.

You gathered it slowly,

petal by petal,

as the wind undressed a dying day,

and a raven carried the bright fragments

of an orphaned dawn

into the mouth of the woods.

Even then, I still dreamed—

until you entered the garden

of my sleep

and buried its small, luminous animals

beneath the roots of your winter.

Even then, you left me hope.

Like a white sun tethered to a field of thorns,

like a candle burning in an abandoned shrine,

like the last red apple

clinging to a blackened tree.

And I grew—

a moon swollen with the tides of other lives,

a garden with room enough

for every wounded and wild creature.

But before the clock divided my life in two,

you came again.

You arrived a native to my anatomy—

and hope fell soundlessly,

like a magpie’s feather

upon the first frost.

Now you wander through my imagination,

your fingers stained with the pollen of dead flowers.

You trouble my compassion.

My empathy.

You whisper that goodness is a mask

worn by the hungry,

that tenderness is a fruit

concealing the worm inside its heart.

And I have grown so still

the ivy thinks I am a statue.

I am merely waiting for you now.

There is nothing I can be bothered with.

There is nothing I can hold.

There is nothing.

And yet—

here I stand,

with my ridiculous heart,

and my impossible devotion to the living.

I am the Magician,

my sorrow a thousand small suns.

I am the Hermit,

with one lantern

through a forest of extinguished stars.

And you, Death—

you are my Death.

The bruised gold of October.

A black goat standing motionless

among the graves of summer.

The raven’s throat,

black with the songs it will never sing.

And the gardens—

always heavy with desire

before the first frost.

Flowers open their mouths wider,

the earth grows fragrant with surrender.

The last bee staggers drunk

through the swollen hearts of dahlias.

Everything becomes unbearably beautiful

when it can no longer remain.

I know this.

I have walked beside you

through every season of my becoming.

And when the final roses bow,

when the magpies abandon the orchard,

when the clocks forget their hunger,

I will not mistake you for a king:

I lead you.

Marni Fraser

1027.2026

III:XXXV

Img| 2026

A Poem…

Everything Beneath the Sun

At dawn, the dragon stirs

beneath the earth's thin crust,

but breathes a fading fire.

The sun has mastered

entering quietly,

as though apologizing

for its bright days.

There are mornings

the light must be talked into the day.

And each morning,

a little less of him returns.

I wonder if he still longs

for the green inviting of spring,

or summer's endless asking,

or if he loves autumn most,

when the shadows grow long enough

to cover him,

and he need not see

his own sorrow.

I think I understand the sun.

And all the things beneath it.

Marni Fraser

10.2026

1990’s

When Giving Up

Wild

It is true.

There is a quiet where my language spoke.

Perhaps it began with those who turned an ear

away from the wind’s carrying of my calling—

each syllable dispersed like seeds

over ground that had no germination.

Now even the cicadas have abandoned

their complicated machinery of sadness.

I have been the tree

beneath which men sharpened their cruelty,

confusing the intricacy of my roots

as an invitation to excavate.

I have been the bitch

whose teeth they counted

while discussing the virtue of obedience.

And what of the incessant manufacturing of meaning—

the mind pleasuring itself

against the indifferent make of the world?

There is only so much a living thing can give up

before its own heart becomes an extraction site.

Even the rhizome,

that clandestine world beneath the earth,

cannot distribute what has been exhausted.

It is true.

I’ve begun the silent work of withdrawing

from the judgment and other people’s hunger.

No surrender.

No forgiveness.

Much more primitive.

I am taking my silence with me,

—a way, certain creatures carry their venom

without ever announcing its existence.

And when anyone comes to inventory what remains,

there will be no evidence of departure—

only earth,

—disturbed where something living

escaped being domesticated.

Wild.

Marni Fraser

10|21|2026

Img|2026

Art & The Artist: In Dangerous Times

It is impossible to separate the art from the artist as though they exist independently of one another. They are one and the same in the act of creation.

The artist is the visionary. The one who conceives, imagines, interprets, and gives form to what did not previously exist. Often multidisciplinary, the artist brings together intellect, imagination, experience, and an understanding of the world that cannot simply be detached from the work itself. Without the artist, the art would never arrive.

It is only after the work has been brought into existence that the artist may choose to separate themselves from it, releasing it into the world much like a child, allowing it to develop a life, meaning, and relationship with others beyond its creator.

That is entirely different from suggesting that the artist is somehow less important than the art.

There are, of course, circumstances in which an artist deliberately distances themselves from the work, particularly when it is commissioned, joyless, or produced without personal investment. But even then, the work does not exist without the person who made it.

Art does not conceive itself. It does not imagine itself into existence. It does not create itself.

To recognize the importance of art while diminishing the importance of the artist is to celebrate the consequence while disregarding its cause.

And in dangerous times, this distinction becomes especially important. When societies begin to tolerate censorship, authoritarianism, the suppression of dissent, and the erosion of individual freedoms, artists are often among those who question what others have been conditioned to accept. They preserve memory, challenge dominant narratives, expose uncomfortable truths, and imagine possibilities beyond the circumstances in which they live.

Art may endure long after its creator is gone, but it is the living artist who must possess the courage to create it in the first place, sometimes at considerable personal risk.

We cannot claim to defend the importance of art while dismissing the importance of the human beings whose imagination, independence, and courage make it possible. Especially now.

Img|2010

The Hours, Days, Years

The Hour Between

At half past four in the afternoon,
I begin to drink.
By five twenty-eight,
I am no longer here.

There is only your face—
then only the suffering
I imagine behind your eyes,
and the terrible tenderness
of being unable to touch it.

I remember how much I love you.
How love did not end
when there was nowhere left
for it to go.

It became something
I carry.

Sometimes, I reach across the silence
to ask if you are okay,
knowing that even kindness
may feel like another wound.
Knowing you may hate me
for remembering you at all.

And here,
in this life I’ve made,
I cannot find
a single person
who believes me worth
the trouble of loving.

There are afternoons
when I’m already dead,
as though this heart
has forgotten its purpose
and continues beating
out of habit.

And still, I remember.

I remember remembering
the one time we held each other,
the way our mouths met
in a world that had already decided
we could never belong to each other.

How strange,
to have been so close
to something impossible.

But before all that,
there was Sweden—

The bed I lay in,
not knowing
which country held you.

Then you came to me
as though from a dream:

There was a dune.
A long, pale stretch of sand.
The silence of a world
I had never entered—

And you stood there,
watching.

You didn’t speak.
You didn’t come closer.

You stood against the distance,
as though you had always known
that one day I would remember.

And now the afternoon is gone.
The glass is empty.
The light has left the room.

Somewhere in the world,
you are alive.

And I am here,

alone with the memory
of having once been yours.

Marni Fraser
October 9, 2026

Real Bodies | 2026

The Forgiving Night

Unshriven

At last my hands are free of all but this;

I court the listless hours

and call it love.

The oath I took outlives the mouth that swore;

I keep its vesper flame

against the wind.

The hills lie mute before the morning breaks;

some lambent bruise of red

unseals the dark.

At noon I sin against the blank again;

I raise unshriven hands

and wake the flesh.

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.

Img | 2026

Food…

The Banana Who Did

Now look what I found

at the end of the summer,

in back of the fruit bowl,

grown steadily glummer.

Too bad it lacked feet,

for with feet it could run

and not be a thing

I would eat just for fun.

Perhaps, had I bitten,

it would never have died

of such terrible fright—

but it chose, then, to hide

from the spoon and the bowl,

from the cereal too,

from a breakfast at noon.

When it heard me come through,

it imagined me chew,

and it thought with a grin,

She will never find me—

which was technically true.

For weeks it lay still

and it made not a peep,

so afraid that my fingers

would peel it asleep.

It refused to be breakfast.

It refused to be pie.

It refused so completely

it forgot not to die.

By August it had

a most terrible plan:

"I'll be so un-banana

she won't know what I am."

So it sucked in its belly

and went leathery, thin,

and folded its yellow

and kept the sweet in.

And there it remained,

the brave little fool,

still hiding from hunger

behind the fruit bowl—

until . . .

I found what was left

of its devious scheme:

a banana so frightened

it had softened to cream.

Marni Fraser

09.2026

The Banana Who Did | 2026

Endings

The Promise

Soon, the black and green tide—

lilacs laid across white marble,

first breath’s bloom,

and the last exhale's fading hues.

Soon, the tired and naked copses—

children of November asleep

in wood-lined cradles,

beneath plaques inscribed

with celebration’s cold grammar.

Their skin sings into dust.

Once mated to linen,

once the beloved

on a morgue’s quiet table,

now only the echo—

like a bell’s final toll

at dusk.

This is the promise:

hesitant,

half-whispered,

never rescinded.

Marni Fraser

0101.2010

Unknown photographer, The Ghost of Bernadette Soubirous, c. 1890. Multiple-exposure photograph.

To Run

The Hedges

To sit among the hedges

she wonders toward

the other side of it—

Are there happy plates and cups?

Are the utensils

properly placed?

To run among the hedges,

she wonders along the length of it—

What causes the sudden change

from green

to the tarnish of spoons?

The eye turns downward.

First it turned away,

then turned itself inward.

Now it closes.

The happy days were there—

a pale cup-ring

drying into the table.

Gladly admitting

they hardly existed

is the weight finally falling.

I long to go.

To marry myself to death,

not its dead,

and to finally be ended

of this boring cycle.

No ode or its idea

is without it.

Marni Fraser

0928.2026

V:XVI PM

Julia Margaret Cameron, The Gardener’s Daughter, 1867. Mary Ryan, model. Albumen print.

The Lie Of Pure Blood

Hatred hasn't disappeared. Neither has the old fantasy that human beings can be divided into clean ancestral categories.

Most of us don't invent our first ideas about people. They are given to us. Families hand down beliefs along with everything else. Communities reinforce them. Children learn very young who is considered familiar or different, who their parents trust, and who they don't. Later, we tend to build friendships inside the world that already seems familiar to us.

This is one of the ways racism survives.

The idea of racial purity survives with it, and I understand exactly why. It is useful. It offers rank to people who have earned none. A person who has built nothing, questioned nothing, and learned nothing can still wake up believing he stands above millions of strangers. All it costs him is his decency and integrity. It is the cheapest pride.

It is also preposterous.

According to the 2020 Census, 33.8 million Americans—more than one in ten—reported more than one race. Even that number barely touches the reality, because a census measures how people identify. Human ancestry is considerably messier than a box on a form.

There isn't even a scientifically meaningful number for how many people in the world are "pure blood." Admixture has shaped nearly every human population, and human beings do not fall into genetically pure, discrete biological races.

(Hellenthal et al., "A Genetic Atlas of Human Admixture History," Science, 2014; American Association of Biological Anthropologists, Statement on Race and Racism, 2019.)

And really, look around.

One cannot look at a Black person and simply say "African." What does that mean? Ethiopian? Nigerian? Haitian? Jamaican? African American with European or Native American ancestry somewhere in the family?

You cannot look at someone who is Hispanic and know whether their family is Mexican, Colombian, Puerto Rican, Spanish—or whether their ancestry also includes Indigenous, Basque, African, or other roots.

And a white person isn't simply "white." Irish, Polish, English, Portuguese, Italian, Scandinavian, Eastern European—sometimes half of Europe is sitting quietly inside one family tree.

The same is true of people we casually call Asian. Indian, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Vietnamese, Japanese—and the families where those lines have already crossed.

We are simply not as separate as we imagine ourselves to be.

Look deeply enough into a family tree, through records or DNA testing, and certainty starts to break down. DNA estimates aren't perfect. They shift as databases grow. But they can do something useful: they can shatter certainty.

This is the conceit of racism: that a category can tell the whole story of a human being. It cannot. People have been migrating, marrying, having children, crossing borders, changing languages, and carrying pieces of one another across continents for thousands of years. We were mixing long before anybody invented the racial boundaries that have so often been shaped by ignorance, fear, and hate.

Culture and history are important. Ethnicity and family matter. None of it establishes human rank or worth.

Skin color certainly doesn't make anybody pure.

No child is born believing it does. Someone has to teach them.

Marni Fraser

0928.2026

[IMG|2026]

The Bone Orchard

This autumn, the leaves

remember blood for me,

their bruised colors deepen

before staining the earth,

and they fall already wounded,

crumpled into clots,

drying where shadows form,

as though death watches.

Here, a thing beyond autumn

is altered inside me—

a small black wind

whirring under the bones,

as I remain strangely alive

after so many deaths,

wearing my pulse lightly—

In the season:

Blueberries, darkening moons.

Black cherries split open,

their mouths full of night.

And wood fractures in chimneys,

exhaling old ghosts

into the roofless eve.

There is still shelter—

a small animal’s warmth,

one lamp, a window,

and beyond the glass,

the world’s cold crown

moving in silence.

How long among crowds

did I practice vanishing,

while begging to hear

and fearing to be heard?

How long I longed

until longing grew teeth,

and its silence wore me.

Then I found it—

my face beneath faces,

my mask without pity,

the one that survived.

There is so much

the night returned.

So much carried

before knowing its name.

So much buried—

that still knew me.

Marni Fraser

0925.2026

VI:XXXVII PM

[2025]

Changed

Waving Goodbye

I stand where the earth swells

with hemorrhaging flowers—

fat with faces,

mouths opening and closing

in praise or protest

of the sun.

They are beautiful

in the way dying things are—

full of light

and already leaving.

The buildings around me

make me small.

They rise and vanish

into clouds,

but it's the trees

that feel more ominous—

the way they lean,

the shadows they cast,

how they don't need

to be anything

but alive

and older than me.

And in the stillness,

I realize

how alone I seem—

and for a moment,

I am.

I carry my love for you

like an injured thing,

dragging it by the leg

through the day.

Its neck won't hold

its head anymore.

It should be buried.

Let it sleep.

I can't read your epistles—

your poems,

your cleverness—

they no longer

speak your character.

They mouth meaning

but have forgotten

what it means.

On the way home

I pass children

shouting their needs

into the world—

unapologetic,

unworried

about sounding like themselves.

And the city cleaner—

he bows his head

to discarded things

as if they matter.

Maybe they do.

Maybe I could too.

But I'd have to give up

fortune-telling,

give up hope,

give up being

the future's echo.

I'd have to stop

apologizing

for my existence,

stop defending

my personality

like a woman

left on a desolate tract

with only her name

and a flint.

And worst of all—

I'd have to stop saying,

"So sorry.

It's my fault again."

Then maybe,

we'd become

two quiet activists—

no longer fighting

the clumsy conduct

of each other.

But today—

the plainer eye sees.

My body knows

what home means:

a place to hang the coat,

to place the hat on the hook,

to leave the sun

and step into the quiet,

closer

to the dark

where the end waits

naked-handed.

She waves.

And I,

still visible,

wave back.

Marni Fraser

0917.2012

Image, “The Cabinet of Curiosities Lounge”
Las Vegas | 2026

The Sunny Days

The Unwitnessed Flower (Part II)

The flower awakens before her witnesses,

and turning her tiny face up toward the sun,

his warmth arrives without needing her beauty;

she meets his bright cheek with her open mouth,

then wears the morning’s dress simply for herself.

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.

Her roots have other loyalties below,

to earth accepting what no wing can love,

and rain entering every pore without judgment,

and the earth holding fast as petals lose their time;

nothing under her asking for a thing.

At dusk the moon passes the sun

while laying her body across the garden.

She keeps the flower feminine and fair,

covers her softly through the cooler hours,

and asks for nothing of the flower in return.

The insects may come back. She often notices they do.

Their praise is sweet, their company brief,

and neither makes a promise of forever.

A wing and root were never built alike;

she finally knows it without bitterness.

Her life belongs to things that know of return:

the rain, the dirt, the moon, and her faithful sun.

She turns her face toward what has always fed her,

beautiful, and unwitnessed.

Marni Fraser

0905.2026

XI:LI A.M.

IMG|09.2026

Nature

Men Are Insects. Women Are Flowers. (Part I)

Men are insects. Women are flowers.

At dawn the garden starts its little trade;

black bodies dance through chalices for sugar,

and stems turn their faces to be chosen,

(ahhh desire, an evidence of worth.)

Nobody sees the labor underneath.

A root blind from wrestling with stone;

the stem performing its posture for the daylight,

each petal keeping ruin at its edges.

Beauty, so exhausting when it’s compulsory.

Women learn early what the garden needs:

stay lovely and somebody will bring water.

Stand straight enough, and hands will clear the weeds.

She blooms believing believing attraction is care,

until the first brown gathers at her hem.

The insect has the luxury of leaving.

His wings make hunger eat the freedom;

meanwhile, her ankles vanish into the earth

while carries yellow signs elsewhere,

still fed by what he flew from.

Sooner or later every flower bends.

Heat worries through the velvet of her face;

one loosened petal buckles from its bind.

The garden turns its bright eyes elsewhere,

although her roots are ever so ravenous.

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.

Beneath us, roots are kissing in the dark.

The bee goes hungry when the flowers vanish.

Dear garden dying in pieces, somehow singly.

Whatever tenderness failed to give

returns eventually as barren ground.

Marni Fraser

0903.2026

XII P.M.

Marni Fraser

0903.2026

XII P.M.

IMG|09.2026

A Clean Margin

My Knife Arrives

My knife arrives holding hands with the sun—

Soon after, I awoke,

then took the knife of my life and listened to the slice.

Hear the small slice I had been refusing to hear for years?

I executed: enough.

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.

I executed: enough.

You dishonest home to someone.

You've made rooms inside rooms inside rooms and called it a life.

Now standing in the wreckage,

you complain about the dust.

My heart's gone rusty loving you.

My hands mourned your beauty—

they're rusty too.

Do you understand?

Rusty.

My eyes rained for years.

Years.

They've become rusty, too.

And still, some hope sparks like a little light

through a house you kept dark.

I covered the flame.

You struck another match.

I covered the flame.

You struck another match again.

I covered the flame.

You watched.

I will never forget you watched.

And you watched.

And watched.

There are monsters who roar.

There are monsters replying politely.

There are monsters closing the door softly.

There are monsters sleeping beautifully.

And there are monsters waking without blood beneath their claws.

You were always so clean.

Or was everyone around you in the faith of looking away?

Look away.

Looking away.

And looking away, yet again.

And you—at the center of it—hungry,

always somehow starving.

But my heart remembers her rug,

her beautiful book of poems,

and every beautiful object

that might have existed between us.

Only they didn't.

Objects are innocent.

Poems are innocent.

Even memory:

it all eventually arranges itself honestly.

My brown-eyed boy was never there.

I made him up because the truth

of life's loneliness was too ugly.

So I gave you his beautiful eyes,

and in them my tenderness,

and out of your mouth my excuses.

I gave a monster years.

Years.

Years.

And years.

And sometime last night,

in night's dark,

I took them back.

Today at dawn you died inside me.

No funeral. No flowers.

No black dress.

No identifying your body.

There was only a silence,

and that I could breathe.

At last.

At last.

At fucking last.

I could breathe.

And somewhere inside me

the sun returned.

It might have been waiting

behind a locked door.

Imagine that—

or was only you in front of the light?

You, the extraction.

This removal.

This clean margin around the death.

Finally, I understand:

losing is the body rejecting poison.

It is the house throwing open its windows.

It is the knife washed clean.

It is the truth entering without knocking.

And the truth says:

At last.

At last.

At fucking last—

I am free.

Marni Fraser

0909.2026

VI:XL AM

Photo by Roman Odentstov, edited by me.

The Months Around It

Anyone Else?

There are people who will tell another person they love them and still know surprisingly little about the ordinary life that person is living. They may know the work, the paintings, the writing, the music and the ideas. They may know what moves them and even recognize what they miss when it disappears, while knowing very little about the person responsible for any of it.

We place enormous importance on intensity when we think about intimacy. We remember what people say when they are moved, the declarations they make, and those rare moments when another person seems unforgettable. The ordinary months surrounding those moments receive much less consideration, although they may tell us considerably more. A person can be unforgettable in a moment and almost entirely unknown over time.

Perhaps one of the simplest measures of intimacy is not what someone says, but what they remember to ask. “How are you, really?” is an ordinary question, but there is a considerable difference between asking it out of convention and asking because another person’s life has remained in your thoughts. Genuine curiosity requires some memory of the life that has continued in your absence. It means remembering what mattered to someone, wondering what became of it, and caring enough to ask without first being reminded.

People can be attracted to particular parts of another person without ever developing the capacity to know the whole. Attraction can easily be mistaken for intimacy when it is intense enough, as can admiration and recognition. There is nevertheless a considerable distance between finding someone compelling and actually knowing them, and it may be greater than most of us care to admit.

Being someone’s muse, fascination, confidante, or beautiful idea is not the same thing as being their friend.

Artists encounter this in an interesting way because the work often goes ahead of the person who made it. Someone may become familiar with the paintings, the writing, the ideas, the music, and even the strange little things an artist collects and shares. Art reveals genuine things about its maker, sometimes things that would be difficult to communicate in any other form, and this can produce a powerful sense of familiarity. It is possible, however, to know someone’s expression intimately without knowing very much about the ordinary human life from which it came.

There is a human being behind the work, and that human being may be considerably less visible than the work itself. Someone may care deeply about what another person creates because of what it awakens in them, yet never become especially curious about the person doing the creating. The distinction is difficult because the affection need not be false. What was felt may have been entirely genuine while still being limited to a particular part of another human being.

The same thing happens outside art. People become attached to qualities in others that answer something in themselves. They value the person who listens, understands, makes them laugh, gives them courage, offers good advice, or remains available when life becomes difficult. It is possible to know exactly where comfort can be found in another person without developing much curiosity about the life of the person providing it. This does not necessarily require cruelty or deliberate selfishness, but it does reveal something about reciprocity.

Reciprocity has very little to do with constant contact. For a long time, I thought friendship was a constant, something maintained daily or at least frequently, but I no longer believe frequency tells us very much about the substance of a relationship. Two people can disappear into their separate lives for months, meet over drinks once a year, and spend two hours in conversation that remains with them for months afterward. Other people can speak every day and know remarkably little about one another.

What matters more to me now is whether the time between conversations has left behind genuine curiosity. Someone remembers where another person was going, what frightened them, what they were trying to finish, what they hoped would happen, or what they loved enough to pursue, and eventually wants to know what became of it. These are ordinary details, but their ordinariness is precisely what gives them value. They are evidence that another person’s life continued to exist in someone’s mind while the two were apart.

There is a particular kind of disappointment in wanting something for years and finally receiving it, only to discover that it was never what you needed. Beautiful language can contribute to that confusion, as can the experience of being intensely wanted. Being wanted momentarily can resemble being known over a longer period of time, particularly when the moment is powerful enough. Time usually makes the distinction clearer because ordinary life eventually replaces intensity, and what remains has to survive without the assistance of a remarkable moment.

This does not mean that love must be constant or that friendship requires an accounting for every absence. People have grief, families, work, illness, marriages, children, distance, obligations, disasters and private difficulties that may never be visible to anyone else. Understanding the limitations of other people is part of loving them. There is, however, a point at which continually understanding everyone else’s limitations requires ignoring one’s own.

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.

I used to give language the greater authority because language seemed capable of expressing what ordinary behavior could not. I am less certain of that now. There are things people may never be able to articulate particularly well that become perfectly clear in the way they behave, just as there are magnificent things people can articulate that never become visible anywhere else.

Sometimes the only sign of love from anybody on this planet is in what they do, not what they say.

There is peace in understanding this on a very profound level.

Marni Fraser
0904.2026

Image | 2026

What?

What?

Was it breaking through?

Hope, the thin argent splinter under skin.

Was it escaping?

A sigh gone feral in the cage of ribs—

Or was it an opinion that screamed behind the ladders of your mouth?

Was it reaching down?

That old amalgam: wrath and melancholy,

gulped back again because someone was an asshole?

Yes. It had begun its small insurrection,

some famished semaphore beneath the blood.

But:

Was it trying to get your attention?

Was it opening something?

Perhaps it wanted to open your legs

or unlatch the ossuary tucked behind your sternum,

or gnaw some third door that has no hinge at all.

Or was it only your throat, speaking a language it hadn’t been given yet?

Marni Fraser

0829|2026

V:XL PM

An Aperture Adjacent by Marni Fraser | 2026

The Violence of Belonging

Let me just say plainly what the New Black Panther Party believes, because that's where the disgust actually lives, and euphemism is doing a lot of protective work here that it hasn't earned. Their own literature calls a Black person who marries or loves outside their race a collaborator — a modern-day custodian of Uncle Tom. Their former national spokesman, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, told crowds outright that there was no such thing as a good white person, and that if you ever found one, the correct response was violence before he had the chance to "change." This wasn't just rhetoric people carried around in their heads. In 2008, two members stood outside a Philadelphia polling place, one of them holding a nightstick, and it turned into a federal voter-intimidation case. It's hard to file that under street theater once an organization has told you, in its own words and through what its members actually did, what it thinks your blood entitles you to and how it expects you to be treated if you're born outside it.

Take away the beret and the borrowed name, and what's underneath is a founding premise: ancestry is destiny, mixing betrayal, and an entire race carries a guilt that no individual member of it can ever finish paying off. That's the same ground the Klan stands on, just facing the other direction.

The Klan started in Pulaski, Tennessee, in the winter of 1865 and 1866 — a handful of defeated Confederate veterans who turned what began as a social club into a terror campaign almost overnight. Its purpose became clear fast: bury Reconstruction, and bury Black political power along with it. It came back a second time in 1915 wearing the same core belief with new targets stapled on, adding Catholics, Jews, and immigrants to the list of things it considered contamination. By the civil rights era, burning a cross on someone's lawn was still just a way of telling a Black family whose blood the neighborhood was supposed to belong to. Every time it resurfaced, it kept coming back to the same idea — that white Protestant supremacy needed defending against racial and social contamination.

The NBPP just flips that logic and lands in the exact same failure. Purity becomes virtue, mixing becomes corruption, and ancestry becomes a legitimate way to decide who's loyal and who belongs. An idea doesn't get less monstrous because the people holding it come from a group that has historically been on the receiving end of racial violence. If it's repellent for a white organization to say someone stops being "one of us" the moment they marry outside their race, swapping which race is on top doesn't fix the idea — it just points it somewhere else. Suffering can explain how someone ends up holding an ugly belief. It doesn't launder the belief once they're holding it.

And here's what makes the whole thing worse — the inheritance this group chose to wear, because the original Black Panther Party was never clean or mythical to begin with. It was a complicated, contradictory organization that had already paid in its own blood for the right to be taken seriously, and some of that blood was spilled by Panthers themselves. In May 1969, members of the New Haven chapter tortured and murdered Alex Rackley, a nineteen-year-old Panther they suspected of being an informant. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins were later tried in connection with the killing. Huey Newton, one of the Party's co-founders, was later accused of murdering seventeen-year-old Kathleen Smith in 1974 and fled to Cuba while facing prosecution. Elaine Brown, who became Party chairwoman that same year, later wrote about the misogyny and violence women faced inside an organization whose public language was liberation.

None of it should be softened. The original Party was capable of real cruelty toward its own people — paranoia, internal power struggles, criminality, government infiltration, and the ordinary human rot that grows inside any movement under siege long enough that it starts eating itself. Its failures matter because being honest about history means holding all of it at once, not choosing the flattering half. The Black Panther Party could be revolutionary and destructive at the same time, politically important and internally brutal at the same time, without ever making racial purity the basis of its politics. You don't have to excuse its worst violence to still see that distinction clearly.

The New Black Panther Party crossed a different line — it made racial separation and collective racial judgment the actual substance of its politics. And it did that while wearing the name of an organization whose history, messy and violent as parts of it were, also included alliances that make the theft particularly ugly.

Bobby Seale — who helped found the original Party and has more standing than almost anyone alive to say what belongs to its legacy — rejected the New Black Panther Party outright and called it a racist hate group. The Huey P. Newton Foundation said the same, publicly rejecting the NBPP's use of the name and insisting the original organization was never founded on hatred of white people. Fred Hampton was murdered in his bed during a Chicago police raid in 1969, and before that happened, he'd helped build the Rainbow Coalition — working alongside the Young Patriots, poor white Southerners in Chicago, and the Young Lords, among other groups. Hampton didn't need poor white people to stop being white before he could recognize that they, too, were being exploited by the same system.

There's something genuinely obscene about borrowing the Black Panther name after that history. The NBPP took an inheritance built by people who proved you could oppose oppression without hating an entire race, and attached it to a politics that treats race itself as the measure of someone's loyalty.

Call it robbery instead of inheritance. It earns the same moral disgust as the Klan, though pretending the two organizations have done equal damage to the world would be historically ridiculous — they plainly haven't. This isn't about equivalent power, equivalent reach, or an equivalent body count. It's about the principle sitting underneath racial supremacy, wherever it shows up. The moment a movement decides that ancestry or skin can determine a person's worth, loyalty, legitimacy, or right to belong, the corruption has already happened. Time tells you how much damage an idea 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.

Marni Fraser

0826|2026

SOURCES

Southern Poverty Law Center. “New Black Panther Party.” Extremist Files. Documents the NBPP’s racial-separatist ideology, The Nationalist Manifesto, its statements concerning mixed-race relationships, and statements attributed to Khalid Abdul Muhammad and other NBPP leaders.

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Race Neutral Enforcement of the Law? The U.S. Department of Justice and the New Black Panther Party Litigation. 2010. Documents the 2008 Philadelphia polling-place incident and statements attributed to New Black Panther Party members and leadership.

U.S. Department of Justice. “Justice Department Files Lawsuit Against New Black Panther Party.” January 7, 2009. Federal account of the Philadelphia polling-place voter-intimidation case.

Anti-Defamation League. “Report: The New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (NBPP).” Documents the organization’s history, racist and antisemitic rhetoric, leadership, and ideological differences from the original Black Panther Party.

Southern Poverty Law Center. “Hate Group Founder’s Post on Homeland Security Board on Hold.” Documents the NBPP’s opposition to mixed-race marriage and statements attributed to Khalid Abdul Muhammad.

The Journal of African American History. “There Is No New Black Panther Party: The New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the Legacy of the Black Panther Party.” University of Chicago Press. Scholarly discussion of the NBPP, its development, ideology, and relationship to the historical Black Panther Party.

Image by Wallace Chuck, edited by me.

I Swear

Extremely depressed by the people who come and go. Saddened by the inability of human beings to simply love— and not out of self motivation or fear.

Depressed that honesty is absent. Genuine camaraderie. That somehow love, vulnerability, and integrity are a lost art and at the end of the day it might just be a lie.

I don’t create out of obligation or to cope. I create because art is the only thing that hasn’t betrayed me.

Photo | 2026 | Canon