Marni Fraser 4/16/26 Marni Fraser 4/16/26

POEM: Untitled

untitled

to see doesn’t end

the mystery

or some desire —

it transforms it.

sometimes knowing

deepens desire;

sometimes knowing

ends it.

for some, revelation

feeds the fire —

for others,

it strips it bare.

the unveiled can

still be infinite,

but not all desire

is made for the light —

some was only

ever hunger.

and nothing more —

such relief.

Marni Fraser

2026

POEM: The Quiet

The Quiet

I’ve leaned my white faces to a wall:

Now they keep their mouths closed—

color has been too eager to confess.

The brushes lie rinsed and sunned—

their bristles call out to my wrists

and my hands that once moved un-trembling.

Tonight I set my instruments,

like one sets down a mirror

after beholding the face of love-

they await your eyes.

Oh you, my Angelic —

the world is always fond of flame,

but now it salts its bread with ash

and thinks the smoke is right.

And you, you walk upright in daylight

carrying your grave like another spine.

You might wear their borders —

your veins forced to split open,

each pulse, the name of your home.

So the world can keep its red mouth,

I’ve no choice in letting maps

swallow themselves—

but the metal singing to the sand,

oh how the song’s killing me slowly.

There was a sound once—

a low, unarmored sound—

invited, and equally sought—

not trumpet, nor an anthem,

it was a breath crossing distance

as if distance were a benediction,

the story of us sings in that sound.

I keep that holiness beneath my tongue

like a forbidden syllable,

for the dunes remember the weight of steel

and they can recall the weight of feet

returning.

And if the night has leaned too far into fire,

there is still is a margin where embers don’t burn.

You see, I’m not abandoning the garden.

I am placing it under stone.

Our roots know how to help it wait,

and our seeds disobey their extinction.

There is a country I carry

that does not appear on any flag.

It is not drawn in ink

but in the space behind my breath,

where something stands clear with love

despite artillery and decree.

That’s where you’ll find me.

And should the burning edge of evening

close over your name,

know this:

I did not let it die.

I keep it in the chamber

where war knows it must kneel

before it enters.

But, I am going now,

until the metal tires of kissing earth,

But not in despair—

like the dark growing ashamed of itself,

But not in deniability,

when the sand shakes its glass from

our eyes—

And returning to the room,

I will unseal the canvases.

And what was hidden

will rise.

Oh my heart.

Oh my dear and gentle friend-

until next time, then.

Marni Fraser

0302.2026

Poem - The Winter I Carry

The Winter I Carry

The winters taught me how the dark weeks in Scandinavia lower us into a spell—
a slow opening of the night and its breath,
the quiet drift where snow decides its landing,
and a white so deep it threatens to erase the entire black landscape —
the me-of-me, the pulse beneath my breasts.

I learned Sweden holding a frostbit lantern:
small window-stars half-drowned in blackened pines,
their amber and scent looking like a ghost caught
between retreat and rise—wild, half-sleeping,
its slow unending shadow caressing old Norse stones.

The houses keep mysteries under roofs
that slope like tired shoulders in the gloom.
No cars murmur down those buried roads—
only the long cold widening its mouth,
and sometimes me, a breath against its teeth.

I miss the iron stove that coughed up sparks,
each ember prowling toward the fur-lined rug—
as if to claim a warmer death.
I miss the siren-fog rituals of dusk,
the outlaw lanterns climbing up to the sky,
so bright their burning vanished past the stars.

The land holds an ancient skogstill hush—
the hush makes you swear the old gods move beneath the drifts,
their antlers made of the moon,
their slumber a bruise beneath the human world:
And I fed the gnomes their porridge in the snow,
though part of me believed they fed on my naivety.

And once, a little mouse climbed into my hand
upon the church steps, as though my skin were home.
I swear the air that night tasted nearly holy—
a sharp metallic note of winter’s crown.

But there was something, and I outgrew that part—
the time when friendship turned to soot,
where the silence bore into the wooden beams of our home
and left feral fingerprints under my hair—
then shadow crossed the landscape like a wound,
a wound that glittered in winter’s hand.

And still—
snow recalls every footstep made.
It keeps its bright dead record of our hours,
a tenderness I sometimes try to hate
because the cold can create illusions,
and illusions can fashion beauty of lies.

Yet, somewhere in that frost-bit solitude,
beneath the runework sky, one truth stayed warm:
the world I love is still the world I keep.
And there is someone—not the ghost of you—
who’ll walk beside me when the snows return,
who’ll keep the wild I carry without fear,
and touch the winter where my blood sleeps.

Someone will walk beside me,
through the winter I carry.

Marni Fraser
1114.2025