POEM: Dust

Dust

Tonight my room embraces bitter dust.

The hallway light keeps stuttering guilt.

My face forgets its use,

and my storms slow only at dawn.

I tried to cut off the thought of you.

I threw your name like meat to dogs.

I buried it beneath stone walls and ills,

inside the sink’s black throat, beneath my tongue.

Still every object drags you back to life.

The coffee pot bubbling against the wall,

the blue static sadness on the news,

a spoon beside an unwashed bowl—

all of them carried your exhausted voice,

that careful voice that always sounded bruised,

as though each word had slept out in the cold.

Forgive me. I was feverish with care.

I pressed ceremony into your smallest gesture.

I pressed my ear against your smallest sigh

as if the dead were speaking through your mouth.

And you—

you wanted discipline instead of a storm.

You told me grief could turn a room feral.

You said a drowning person drags by instinct.

Sometimes your kindness laughed as scorn.

Sometimes you spoke like someone cauterized.

But then your hands remained humane.

Outside, the traffic keeps inventing distance.

Each passing car un-arms another hour.

The moon hangs in the clouds like a wound.

This cigarette burns with more resolve

than I have shown my own unsteady life.

I’m glad to be burned.

Somewhere, somebody folds a thing with love.

Somebody laughs against another’s throat.

Some woman rinses strawberries in moonlight.

Perhaps you sleep without the ache of me.

Perhaps your body has already learned

the painless joys of my absence.

Meanwhile I move from day to day half-dead.

Even the mirrors seem embarrassed now.

They hold my face and keep my eyes the way these empty rooms do.

And still I cannot make myself unlove.

I tried. God knows I rehearsed disappearing.

I tried to become smaller than a stain,

smaller than steam escaping from a grate,

smaller than breath against a winter scarf.

But sorrow is an animal with keys.

It opens every locked and swollen door.

You were more known to me than my own hands.

Older somehow. Familiar in the bones.

As if my life had circled yours before

through other ruined places, other names.

Now morning soon and slowly at the blinds.

The sky looks about to sob and full of ash.

I am so tired of carrying this life—

this growling bookcase full of underlined margins,

these nerves that hum like electrical wire,

this heart with all its threaded little looms.

If I have wounded you, then let me say

I knew it even while I could not stop.

There are apologies that sour too late

inside the mouth and poison the tongue they touch.

Still—I am sorry for the weight of me.

Sorry my love arrived with broken teeth.

Sorry I turned your silence into judgment

and every absence into its own verdict.

The sun will rise without consulting us.

The buses will kneel down and take on strangers.

Some child will lose a toy in the park.

The grocery clerks will stack their apples.

And I will sit beside the open window

while dawn unbuttons all its dreadful light,

feeling my life drip slowly through the hour

like rainwater escaping through a crack.

Marni Fraser

0516.2026

Photo 2026

POEM: Nothing

Nothing

What use is anger—

it’s burning my hands,

it’s tools without handles,

smoke

turning desire blind.

What a thing

to place in my lap.

What a life—

flinging off the crown,

gold ringing to the floor.

What a way to dissolve—

to relinquish my crown

with both hands open.

That person:

Not a demon.

Not an angel.

A hollow bone.

A frame without its fill.

Nothing.

Marni Fraser

0505.2026

Photo Marni Fraser 2026

POEM: Kali in the Roses

Kali in the Roses

There is a goddess in the roses and poppies,

the ones opening like words

that shouldn’t speak—

And whose petals drop like the last

of something not known in time?

I am not going there.

I was always there.

The ruin is always inside my walls.

I sigh and night-birds

lift from the nirvan-dark —

Oh borderless cloak. . .

You stretch across half the breathing world,

your hem a slow hemorrhage

when crimson meets its own shadow

and even then I don’t look away.

Somewhere under the crust of everything

a fist strikes the earth’s spine

and the pain rings.

—

Kali.

It was you all along —

your many arms not cruel

but thorough,

because your justice is thorough.

You gave me the divine fruit of endings

and broke it open against my neck

until I understood

that the breaking was the lesson

and the lesson had no end.

I choked on what I could not swallow.

I choked on the choking.

I choked on the fact

that I open anyway.

—

Again.

And what do I know?

This world does not end things clean.

It leaves me walking,

leaves me articulate,

leaves me capable of beauty

while my house goes dark —

room by room,

each light going out

as I watch.

The world simply

practiced on me.

—

The shadows used to be the bell —

iron tongue, deliberate,

counting you out.

Now they’re older:

a choralmoan —

voices low and frictionless,

mourning without object,

a sound that does not need anyone

to be its reason.

—

And the stars —

they do not fall so much as surrender,

spinning into their own end

the way a certain me did,

a dignified death,

quiet.

What crashes against the earth’s chest?

A hole opening in the night’s fabric

that the night does not repair

because the night

has decided

it prefers the opening.

I carry a last light in a body

that stopped making it —

a broken lantern carries this flame

it did not kindle

and will not feel warmth from,

and holds it anyway

because the road is dark

and there are others on it.

A failed attempt at martyrdom. . .

This is mechané —

the pendulum of participating,

the apparatus of continuing.

Love once passed through me

like warm weather through a valley —

it shaped the land,

then went on.

What remains

is not grief, exactly.

Something like

the memory of that temperature —

the body’s knowing

of warmth existing once,

and the burn of it in the tissue,

a scar to be read

but not felt.

—

And the world spins its works —

its magnificent indifferent works —

and dying among them,

unremarkable to anyone watching,

unheroic,

unannounced —

to anyone.

Marni Fraser

0505.2026

Photo by Marni Fraser

05.05.2026

Poetry: Descanso

Descanso

Each day another piece of me falls away —

falls into the long grass

like a coin dropping into black water

and the days of my life vanish.

The air accepts me without ceremony.

Traffic moves through me as wind—

through a house without walls left.

These small tallies, so many —

that I have stopped counting them.

I am dying in ways unseen.

Each love opened a door

and walked out wearing something of mine.

I did not ask for it back,

and didn’t know until the cold came in.

Each morning the sun becomes an obligation.

The ache tilts north, then nowhere —

and I perform the necessary motions

of a garden performing a rite of spring

long after the gardener has gone.

What remains are grains —

not sand but something more minute,

the last gold dust of an hourglass

no one cared to reverse.

How to carry the weight of accumulated seconds?

All those moments stacked like ruins —

I would give them to someone

who still believes in time’s architecture.

But I have become transparent to desire.

One dim hour folds into another dim hour.

One disappointment closes its eyes

as its child opens its own.

One face practicing its lying

rehearses in the mouth of the next.

And I —

a moving effigy for the unresolved,

a still pool for the ones

whose inner compass had no shore —

I held what they could not.

I paid for the quiet they thought was mine to give.

What is left

lives in a few last grains

suspended above the dark I am.

How does one wake each morning continuing

while the body rehearses its ending?

Because I have learned

the mercy of the almost-finished —

the last note

that doesn’t resolve,

the garden at November,

the light

finally learning

how to go out.

Marni Fraser

0430.2026

me | sweden | 2008

POEM: The Misplaced Light

The Misplaced Light

(to past relationships)

I have misjudged the weight of my own wanting —

followed the wrong door down its dark road,

walked through a stranger’s eyes still hunting —

and carried back the empty load.

After bleeding I see clear:

the forest stood entire

and I bent to read a single leaf.

I called you destiny—you were a fire

burning my map and leaving only grief.

You are our past life — this pale and fading ghost—

walking the woods of what almost was.

I could see you in the future I want most

but will not touch, I’d bleed again,

the glass is too thin.

Past love: You are all rose.

You are all thorns inside it.

The calm waiting behind breaking waves.

A light I carried wrong. I have to hide it

back inside the earth,

digging my own heart’s grave.

You are the one I did not meet this life.

I do not know what country keeps you,

what name you carry, whether peace or strife —

I only know the last life,

and never the now.

—

I have the crying tree and the mangled bush,

the sea’s salt waiting with its cold and clear,

the tide taking me back without a rush,

drowning me slow in spite of my muffled scream,

the gulps of salt.

I have the birds not asking my name,

the sun dropping its gold into my hair—

I have this solitary, difficult, exacting thing.

I have the animal world, wild and free,

whose many faces open like an invitation:

witnesses asking for nothing back.

I am alone. But then again — I always was.

The dying candle doesn’t mourn its own light’s death—

It burns until ending,

because that is the only thing to do.

Fade.

Marni Fraser

04-29-2026

Image of me by Sadie | 2026

POEM: The Feast Before the Forgetting

The Feast Before the Forgetting

Tonight I am light,

a moon that has learned to recognize its

face in slow and gentle water —

I smile, and the water smiled back.

The leaves speak in old dialect.

Animals call out to no one, or to everything.

My hands had been closed a long time,

open today like a door unlocked.

—

Your eyes come for me,

your leopard eyes simply here,

crouched in the golden grass of my life.

My fingers move across your face

like a woman reading the face of beauty itself—

she dreams in his language, not her own.

Oh you beautiful boy—

the full length of you.

To not have been met with such gentleness before —

that truth lives below my crown,

it curls in the oldest room of me,

pressing against what I have kept shut,

opening now

(this flower)

in the exact moment I choose nothing,

and everything chooses me.

—

You stand inside my dreams

your fire dancing still —

But who are you?

You don’t remember

how we played together

before all of this,

before our names,

before countries divided us

like a knife divides bread —

the white dice warm between our palms,

the wren singing its one small truth—

we sat beneath the jasmine that only blooms

after dark,

and the pomegranates that we split open on the feast table,

their seeds scattered garnets,

they are every word I would write for you in this life.

Later, beneath the quince tree,

you took what I offered

which is to mean I offered everything

which is to mean the tree bore witness

and did not look away.

—

You made a river of me.

You cast yourself inside the current —

swam the whole length of me —

and I kept you.

I held you in my streams

and I kept you.

I captured you in that other life.

I must have.

How else to explain this?

—

Where are you?

Why did you come in my darkest season

like a figure at the edge of the dunes,

neither arriving nor leaving —

a shadow becoming a boy, becoming a man

becoming the shape of something I almost recognize?

I came to you alone.

You have always come to me alone.

—

Who are you?

And then, at last, the only question

that contains all the others:

Where are you?

Oh, Beloved.

Marni Fraser

04-29-2026

Self Portrait with Jon. B. 2024

POEM: Wanting To Die

Wanting To Die

How many times I crossed the dark,

arrived at the lit room,

and felt the pull beneath my sternum —

the body’s disagreement against its own continuing.

I have come such distances to stand here,

appetite for departure already home,

already humming at the head of me

like something never fully latched.

Kindness — what others carry easily,

their mouths full of it, easy as weather —

I have turned it over in my hands

and found the underside consistently absent.

What a declaration for the diminishing hour.

What a thing to finally say aloud

when the light is already dimmed,

when the window holds its own cold.

Pathetic, says my voice that is always honest.

But even that voice is losing interest in its own indictment,

filing the last complaint without conviction.

Next time is the terminus.

I have decided this the way one decides

to stop a conversation that was never

answered in the correct language anyway.

I am glad.

The living of it — that sustained combustion,

that long and unrewarded residency in pain —

is nearly through.

The door is not a threat anymore.

It is the first generous thing.

Marni Fraser

0426.2026

10:13pm.

Detail “Blossom Deary” by me

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.

POEM: Exit Canticle

Exit Canticle

Some direction takes me to the mouth of leaving—

on foot beneath the cauterizing heat,

or further, always further,

away and into the unknown.

And I say to my sad eyes:

you are going away now.

Then I lay my head down,

shake it loose of everything—

into the desert,

into the cities

I have conjugated like old verbs—

until finally I become them.

Vast. Scoured. Sovereign.

Not clean because I am pure—

clean because I am done.

Because I can unlatch myself.

Because your life is mortared shut.

You are a reliquary no one can open—

gorgeous, gilded, absolutely hollow.

Gems under the meridian sun,

meant to glitter from a corridor away—

never to survive proximity,

never to hold a single thing

when the light changes.

Goodbye, she sings, and her voice

goes out like a sail finding the fog’s corridor—

then into the preposterous blue,

into skies so cloudless

they become a second silence,

vast as everything

she no longer is carrying.

How ravaged a thing is a person

who has only the grammar of kindness

and none of its quickening.

A statue not merely hollowed—

but casting hollow,

poured and cooled and polished

into the shape of something

that had a soul nearby

and left only its silhouette.

Corrosion is already at work

in chambers I no longer enter.

I am not waiting for it.

I have already walked into the pellucid distance

and become indistinguishable from it—

wide,

ungoverned,

finished with grief.

II.

Fuck you—

for the architecture of your suffering,

for the intellect worn like a gorget,

for the voice kept soft as absolution

while your hands were already elsewhere.

I wish you untroubled mornings.

I wish you exactly the peace you deserve.

You are a creature of deniability—

not by accident. By appetite.

You verified me in secret,

like an inquisitor with clean hands.

You chose the voice

that had nothing at stake

over the one that stood there

with nothing left to conceal.

You came through distance—

cold, precise—

and returned

the moment the door was unlatched.

And still

you lied.

Because honesty in your mouth

would be a foreign country

with no roads in.

You were given something irreducible

and selected the counterfeit—

because the counterfeit

asked nothing of you

In the room where you are alone

with the accurate version of events,

be ashamed.

Marni Fraser

0426.2026

The Ghost 2024

POEM: Apparat

Apparat

Further away —

that’s you,

smaller

when I go,

because I’m

smaller

when you go.

It seems

people have a worse time of it.

Honesty—

a losing move.

The cog doesn’t care.

It processes you—

continues.

I’m gone.

Keep meter.

I.

Three years is a long time to away myself.

I’ve been alone long enough

to know its meaning.

If you come back

you think me a home.

If you come back the same way,

you think me a joke.

I’ve been the focus of idiots.

I’ve been judged by the dumb.

II.

Have integrity

whether you love God or not.

You have your face

looking back at you

in the mirror

greet it clean

every sunrise.

III.

slowly you become smaller

it was your character

that was flawed

through your script.

It’s mine

that’s vindicated

through my own love.

Enjoy stupidity

Fish.

There are a million in the ocean.

Splash.

Now you’re one.

Marni Fraser

2026

Self Portrait by J.B. 2017

Poem: The Mountains of My Torso

The Mountains of My Torso

Time’s hand is too steady,

The constantly dizziness of my dreams,

my visions dazzled and dazzled.

Hope Keeps me moving forward—

The memory of your beauty

Smiling just beneath the mountains of my torso,

Our eyes kiss and Widen the pillars of my hips,

Make my hands this madness again,

Only now I cry,

Oh but not for he:

Believe it or not,

For all women who love

And lose, who feel on the verge of it —

Or have absurd some air of it—

Doesn’t matter how.

Many seek a way from this globe—

Ignore its dirt,

I cling to the breadth of all desire,

Hope against hope you are drawn

Close,

Too that it is intense,

So much so, you feel the bite of

My kiss upon your life.

Marni Fraser

April 20, 2026

10:50am

My Eyes, Your Windows by… an Angel.

POEM: Katabasis for No One’s Benefit

Katabasis for No One’s Benefit

PART I

The woods don’t call me to tell me.

I’ve walked into their language before,

their syntax bending at the root of a sentence—

a woman ending without a period,

and the long pause of an unmapped ocean

finding its way beneath a heavy sky.

I was the argument of stones.

I’ve always been this argument of weight.

The friendship always begins in gold,

becomes a stratum—

pressed cries compacting—

mineral lies,

the earth unburying them,

and their names are given quietly

after someone who will never hear them.

I do not need to hear them.

My life, a figure at the edge of earth

who sets her wreath upon the forest floor—

not surrender, but a clean axis

of a hand that has learned the study of enough:

those elegant equations

where wanting drops to zero

and what is left is the integer of self—

irreducible, prime, cold as mercury.

She doesn’t weep. I’m of a certain class—

learned early, and kept.

I have known another woman,

one of the white interior—

not white as purity, but the silence

of a room emptied of intention,

white as the eye of something

that has never once looked inward—

and I have watched a man

mistake that blankness for depth,

confuse the echo of his wanting

for a voice that understands him,

then press his face against it

like a cartographer without direction—

a lost legend deciding blankness is territory.

Let him map her emptiness.

I am a country with a complicated border.

River systems he has never traveled,

elevations with no roads approaching,

a quality of winter light

that takes years of residency to recognize.

You cannot arrive there casually.

You cannot land there speaking loosely.

And she signaled in plain sight—

drew my attention to the old game.

I saw it, set myself between the barrels of those signals,

laid something down

to see what would return across the land:

What came back wore the face of a dog

that had taken its bite in the dark

and kept the taste of it

somewhere it wouldn’t show.

I knew it before I named it—

the taste of not quite lying

in his words and nervous laugh—

a laugh that kept something back.

A cowardice that requires upkeep—

like a garden overtaken by a small shrub

in the absence of a gardener.

And the absent gardener here is

also the delicate flower.

Now I stop.

⸻

PART II

Give the faux Phoenix that laborious landing—

the maintenance, the forgetting,

the intricate performance of narcissus—

she who has built her architecture

on the anxiety of his attention,

driving him toward the edge

the way weather drives a nail—

there he goes, a man who does not know,

his interior accepting whatever weather—

and she makes her storms for province.

This is not my sadness to carry—

but her unrest and lies acting without a stage.

No audience, no season.

My grief: I brought my full self—

compass, lamp, his coordinates—

and found the territory already deeded away

to someone with no homing,

who would not go beneath the surface

where the country actually is.

I am the depth she cannot reach

and does not know to want—

the ocean beneath her turbulence.

And what I carry down with me:

The knowledge I was a world

before a certain name spoke through me—

a territory in full before a certain man

who mistook me for scenery.

But I am the Efflorescence.

I will not mourn what could not stay its self.

I note it—

the way a scientist notes

an element that failed to bond—

then return to my woods,

the solitude that requires none,

the locked cabin of my perception

where the work is,

and the light enters

and the correct angle is found,

where silence chooses who enters.

A mountain does not grieve its own erosion.

Instead it becomes the mountain to a hill—

the hill makes it not diminished, but translated.

Something harder than the peak.

The mineral record.

The stratum that outlasts

whatever once had seen it.

Marni Fraser

April 7, 2026

6:30am

Self Portrait, January 2026

Poem: Who Cares

Who Cares

Who cares she thought —

running among

the hedges of shapes,

the green of youth,

the wrestling of brocade —

who cares she thought

as the guns press

on their triggers,

and the shells

do their worst —

and the distance

becomes the heartbeat,

and the heartbeat

becomes love,

and the rise

and the fall —

of the breath

that carries it,

and the love

that dies within

hopeless sighs —

who cares,

and the brocade, thinner now,

and the heartbeat

against the brocade —

its weight remembered —

and the blush

of the white cheek —

and the mole

that was earned

between her legs,

and the beauty

of that ancient dance —

and the thrashing sea

in the ship

bound home

after Asia —

no softer for it —

and the brocade again—heavier now,

and the hummingbirds

finding the flower —

the depth

of the hardness

that entered into —

the soft pedal

sinking deeper,

and the love

dragging low

before it lifts —

and the heave,

and the hold,

and the no

when he has to

say goodbye —

But there is

always our time —

Oh, but the brocade,

and the hedges,

and the green —

not as it was —

and the rise

losing the fall,

and the sigh —

and the stall.

Marni Fraser

04.2026

Glass Calligraphy Pen by Marni Fraser

Poem: ELEGY WITH JASMINE AND IRON

ELEGY WITH JASMINE AND IRON

The silence calls out from a grave

the ground embraces what the living can’t

and sorrow seeps below as dark as exile’s blood in that hour

the wounded earth receives

and will not close it

What famine rearranges the days

when faceless lives are scattered into ash

love itself weeps oil into the throats of seraphim who sing

oh mothers beloved

oh shattered kin all

What becomes of the ripened fruit

when lions fold their golden bodies down

Where does joy wander when the lion sleeps in silence underground

oh land I’ll never hold

you breathe inside me

Your jasmine is in my marrow

your quince and pomegranate blade and cup

the book the quill the hunger of bodies learning how to open

the lovemaking that grieves

the iron hunger

The roses drown within their weeping

yet Persia’s wounded soul lifts its face

how do we suffer any tender thing to bleed and still abide

oh country oh my love

how do we still live

Marni Fraser

0311.2026

Jasmine by Marni Fraser

Poem:My Country (With Two Right Feet)

I wrote this poem in 2010.

In 2008 I voted for Obama from Sweden. I was watching my country from a distance and believed it was capable of expanding its own promise.

When I came home, the resistance was already in the White House. It wasn’t about policy. It was about his color. Reform was treated as intrusion before it had even began.

I heard people argue that the poor were a burden. That helping them was waste. That some lives were simply a loss.

Race moved through the conversation whether anyone named it or not.

This country has always contradicted itself. But it also attempted something radical — to extend respect beyond tribe and inheritance.

That attempt matters to me.

It was meant for everyone. I still believe that.

Marni Fraser

2026

____________________________

My Country (With Two Right Feet)

A country with two right feet

cannot keep its balance.

My country, ’tis of thee—

It advances toward injustice

with the confidence of certainty,

consuming generations not yet born.

From the eye of the pyramid

to chambers thinned by corporate hands,

power circulates in polished loops—

green, abundant, unashamed.

Below, the gathered poor

inherit the invoice.

They are instructed in the elegance of circular logic—

a system complete unto itself—

until the circle closes

and they are removed from it.

This nation refuses the middle.

Not left.

Not right.

But lurch.

The machine persists.

The media ignites on command—

language wired to detonate,

signal enthroned as substance,

tumult ratified as truth.

“For which it stands.”

Prediction fails.

Clarity thins.

The structure—once named Republic—

turns on uneven gears.

One side overdriven.

One side scarcely moving.

Its burden was never divinity.

Its burden was integrity.

Its death will not be partisan.

It will be structural.

A fall

executed

with two right feet.

Marni Fraser

2026

Lake Tahoe, 2013 by Marni Fraser

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

Poem: Walk The Fire

Walk the Fire

Walk with me through cinder—

or don’t come.

On nights like this

heat runs to the blood

and it doesn’t blanch.

I am not linen.

I am pumice—

hands etched

by abrasion.

Love was never meadow for me.

It rose from a red seam at the edge of night—

burning horizons

where breathing sears.

Three names live there.

Three constellations I will not unmoor.

All else receives measured warmth—

a perimeter,

a door unlatched once.

Oh my triad in flame—

not scripture,

not cathedral carrion—

but mathematics forged in ordeal,

impossible figures

fed by combustion.

Do not instruct me in divinity.

The cloistered man attempted it.

He left with silence in his mouth,

certainty clinging

like mildew.

Do not school me in rule.

A mark on paper reveals the soul’s sinew.

I have turned from beloved eyes

after seeing the machinery behind their light.

History is long.

My judgment is swift.

I have seen love burning at the rim of the world.

I keep only three against my breast.

The rest meet a boundary bright as fire.

They say: severe.

Inhospitable.

I have earned the right to remain unsoftened.

And yet some days, I cry.

To love without anesthesia.

To grieve frailty without kneeling.

To step away when cowardice calcifies the spine.

I cannot swallow it.

If tyranny darkens the air,

I will place my body between you and the blade—

not from tenderness,

but allegiance

to breath itself.

My boots on the ground.

Every living thing requires ignition.

Purity is rumor.

Clarity arrives charred.

The horizon burns.

Three lights endure—

my love,

my friend,

my blood.

I am seasoned.

I keep the fire.

M.C.F.

0216.2026

The Fire by Marni Fraser

Poem: Between Love & Fallout

#64

Between Love & Fallout

“There will be sex after death, we just won’t be able to feel it.”

— Lily Tomlin

In love and horny,

I know, it’s corny

But:

the leaves and the trees,

the birds and the bees,

the flora and the fauna,

the heat in a sauna,

(Somewhere in this world!)

The hormones are raging,

and the world keeps aging,

so, which is louder

and makes us prouder—

The nursing home closet,

where Harold misplaces it—

or the schoolyard dugout,

where they all make out?

Ah,

the wind and the rain,

the pleasure and the pain.

If there is a loss,

there’s more gain!

The oil and water

only work when it’s hotter.

The kiss and the care,

the undressing stare—

(Trying to put it together in a poem

I don’t even own.)

It’s too fucking funny and utterly depressing,

the sheer fact someone’s not undressing,

Doesn’t keep me from laughing, making it a joke,

but I’ll tell you what, man—

I think we’re soon beyond the stroke.

So, let’s turn our gaze to Mother Nature

and all the wild things she will conjugature—

And let us laugh and skip and dance for fun,

and think of love and lust, while galloping under the sun.

After all, the world is in flames, torn apart,

and doomsday is creeping up, like an ill-timed fart.

So let’s be gay and merry, and maddeningly free—

and revel in Mother Nature’s lunacy!

Marni Fraser

0317.2025

Lieutenants Heart by Marni Fraser

POEM: The Thinner Air

The Thinner Air

I used to party impossible summers—

white-faced cliffs with money whispering,

harbors tucked behind unmarked stones,

no clicking cameras over cheap florals—

and sea-light turning rich boats into diamonds.

I was a made-up woman there, intact,

her laughter gilded by the hourglass,

pulse like a pearl shown in public.

Meanwhile the planet yawed off its pin—

some brutal dusk kept chewing through the minutes, fucking them raw—

and my thoughts rolled like a lone glass shooter—

circling my skull like fate without fingers.

Too many faces—each a little reminder.

Too many mouths that spewed their venom.

Others waited until the armor came off,

then skinned my candor for their hunger;

the world came through an electronic scroll—

news like ants across my nervous system,

entire nations making my shaking hands.

I blamed my ribs for the cages they built.

Anger was the weather I lived in—

then I swallowed it, let it burn, glad for it—

the heat went down like fired coals

and settled where my soft deaths were.

The pulse didn’t die, it darkened.

Something undid its mouth from my prayer.

What I wanted thinned like fog burned by sun:

wasn’t loss—but no longer desiring them—

the body flung off its old deals.

The wanting stopped its eating.

I saw desire as another voice,

throwing its mouth around love

that thinks its hunger is holy—

my thirst an altar of mirrors,

its sex forgetting its own hands,

devotion kneeling to anything staying.

So I stood a while and let the fever rearrange me.

I found a pleasure in waiting,

satiation in starving it into a line—

and the keys fell clean into my hands—

and the way opened,

and I let the void marry me—

open to its surprises,

not caring what I’d become.

Marni Fraser

0211.2026

The Thinner Air by Marni Fraser

POEM: Untitled

untitled

Do your eyes wake heavy—

do some mornings find them so?

Mine see a wound I did not make alone—

the wound isn’t me, or even all the world,

but hands that hide the light beneath a fate

not ours.

I say—no way.

That grief must unlock its maw,

let the cold from all hearts,

let us all be warmth instead.

Leave the cage fear lets you live in well.

An arm around a soul can still mean

the years haven’t finished with our own.

Carry someone—

then they’re not their own stone.

This white love is not a ghost of hopeless kin:

it’s a dollar passed, a bite,

a sad moment spared.

If breathing stays, then mercy still has a clock.

If we are living, we cannot be

absolved of it.

Marni Fraser

0202.2026

Eye Myself by Marni Fraser 2026