FREEDOM

FREEDOM

PART 1

Freedom won by turning the mirror

to watch the thing behind me—

to finally walk into its own proportions,

survive its own weather,

wear its impossible shape—

and all without my hands to fix it.

There's a freedom

that comes as numbness comes—

as the body abandoning

a place it has been pierced too often,

and always without mercy.

And just before surrender,

one kept peeling back

what they thought was their own skin,

only to discover

they were wearing another season,

some other person's weather,

and carefully wore it upon the shoulders

until they forgot where they ended.

And in the freedom,

the flowers have not somehow transformed

but were always this bright.

And after the rain,

when the asters didn't deepen,

the creosote did not gather into

a new shade of green either.

It was my eyes all along

that finally stopped kneeling—

and simply looked.

And in seeing, the last tears

didn't dissolve into the ground—

They gathered in my palms

like little glass beads,

like ruin trying to return—

that no longer belonged

inside my skin—

⸻

PART 2

and behind me,

Pierrot had lived inside the act so long

it became his face.

The audience were all clowns.

Who knew?

I did.

Who knew carnival lights

were nailed to boards,

bright enough to fool the road,

and never the daylight.

Who knew?

I did.

Why linger?

There is freedom

in no longer asking the compass.

The compass only lands

on an idea of a place

no longer existing

for me.

I was the one

walking circles around it,

calling it my journey.

There is freedom

when it finally stands

without asking

to look directly at itself.

Freedom

because I have stopped

erasing another person's outline.

My feelings inside

fractured—

river ice giving way—

one long interior sound,

then water

doing what it intended

all along.

And I no longer love the bird

kept in this house—

so I opened its window.

And I no longer wait

for a voice

that always belonged

somewhere else.

So the man-made prison burns.

And yet

not really gloriously.

No.

It blackened quietly,

moons ago—

beam by beam,

until dawn

could no longer remember

where to cast its shadow,

and only ash remained

with the shape

of what it once contained.

I turned the ashes over

until nothing remained.

Then wished

to become myself again.

The misfortune

of arriving

at the wrong fate

is sometimes

the only door

through which

the truth

at last

enters.

© Marni Fraser

0702.2026

[Ⅻ · 33]

Image | 2026

TO BIND TO FINISH

A Binding, Darker Wrought

By blood unshed and bone unbroke,

By the black hour when no cock hath spoke,

I bind thee, shadow, in thy own coil,

I bind thee, serpent, in thy own soil.

Let thy tongue turn to ash in thy mouth,

Let thy compass forget the north and the south,

Let every door thou wouldst enter be wall,

Let every hand thou wouldst raise, wear a pall.

By the worm that turns beneath the stone,

By the crow that picks the field alone,

I call the dark to eat the dark in thee,

I call the rot to catch what tries to flee.

Thy name I do not speak, nor need I speak it—

The binding knows its mark, and shall not break it.

Let thy nights be long and thy mornings thin,

Let the thing thou art be caged within.

Not death I ask, but stillness absolute,

Not blood, but silence at the very root.

So let it stand, unblessed, unbroke, unspoken—

Sealed till the seal itself lies broken.

⸻

A Ward for Myself

Now round mine own head I draw the ring,

Round mine own heart, a guarded thing.

No shade returning, no third fold cast,

Shall cross this line, or hold, or last.

What I have loosed, I loose alone—

It walks not back to flesh or bone.

No third fold turns to head or heart,

So sealed from end as from the start.

⸻

The Making of the Water

Sage laid in, and sulfur too,

Salt and smoke to season through,

Flowers from my grave, unmourned,

Candles spent, their banishing done,

At midnight, all laid down within the bowl,

Given to the elements whole.

Red string wound about the bowl,

Red string binding, red string whole,

Water taking what is placed,

Nothing wasted, nothing chased.

One drop only, given last,

Drawn from hours of drawing past,

Falls into the water still—

Blood to close what is my will.

So the water holds it all,

So the working does not fall,

Sealed by hand and sealed by art,

Sealed by what came from my part.

⸻

Marni Fraser

2026

Ⅻ · ○○

Self | 2026

Vanishing

Vanishing

“One gives way to one’s greatest fear

only after the deepest bond

has exhausted its last resistance.”

The moon gives way along a hidden seam:

A white vessel split upon the dark,

its flawless halves made sacred

only after the fracture.

Or the moon looks to me

like a plate broken into bright pieces,

only to become more beautiful

for having been held too dearly.

I have trusted myself to set sail

upon the black tide beneath constellations,

where a star keeps its bright mouth closed

to swallow an oath no one can witness.

No compass is cradled in my hand:

To watch how the water bends

toward an unseen harbor,

and to know I surrender

to its quiet certainty.

Even the darkness

knows where to deliver me.

Then you found another stone

to cast into a water already trembling.

My sadness arrives as a stranger

the stranger wearing your shadow—

the patient nightmare

that has always followed you,

feeding upon every sliver of light in you,

until only its own thirst and hunger remain.

And when it finally learns your name,

it will answer only to you.

You. Yourself,

Vanishing—

Marni Fraser

0630.2026

8:49am

Image by Daniel Torobekov | A mesmerizing starry night sky reflecting beautifully over the ocean and rock formations of Hawaii, USA.

Poem: Anyway

Anyway—

I am alone.

Perhaps I always was.

Isn't everyone?

There is nobody to dissolve into,

and the ocean isn't asking me to.

Little by little

they become targets to knock off.

Tin stars.

Empty bottles.

The bright fake center

of a little quiet carnival.

And since I don't have an ally,

I don't have a witness.

I don't have a steady star.

Anyway.

Then I ask:

what good is time,

anyway?

Never a familiar.

Never the steadiness.

Never continuity.

No length of time

it takes to know a thing.

Still, a river learns its paths.

Winter learns

the land and trees.

A hand learns another hand

through the darkest hours.

And anyway, for my life,

only the weather

passing me

and us

by.

Nothing that gave a shit.

Or stuck.

Or wanted to stay.

Never continuation.

Anyway.

Never continuation.

Marni Fraser

06.22.2026

Photograph | 2026 | Real Bodies Exhibit

Poem: The Night Falls

The Night Falls

Sometimes the night falls

like a sleepy eye

over the city—

like a possibility

that cannot become itself,

when the promised dawn

forgets how to come.

Sometimes you lose your feelings.

Sometimes you lose.

Or they lose you.

And become the night instead—

all that darkness

keeping quiet.

My eye closes

upon this idea of you.

My eye closes.

The way night closes

over a field.

The way night closes

over a heart.

My eye closes again.

And how beautiful.

And how sad.

Maybe like the earth and sky—

turning toward one another

for thousands of years,

held by the same gravity,

never touching.

Never touching.

Beautiful captor—

you took years.

Years.

Now everything outside my hands

is dead.

Everything outside my hands

is dead, now.

Everything is outside,

and sometimes the night falls.

Marni Fraser

0617.2025

Image, 2025

Poem: Hidden In Light

Hidden In Light

She stands like bamboo stands—

vertical, and against a wall

with the gravel at her feet.

(Always the light comes from the wrong direction.)

From a distance she seems composed,

and from a distance, everything is.

But come closer.

Find the crux—

the hinged recess where her body

decides to live on,

where everything that becomes a branch

is still just the bearing,

still just heat under her skin.

That is where the woman lives.

Not in the form seen on the street.

In the joint—

the amber and coarse interior—

inside the seconds just before the split

when she was still

brave and undivided.

This is what it is to be a woman:

to be seen as a system or design,

and to know yourself as a process instead—

to hold vertical lines

while something at the center branches,

and keeps deciding,

and keeps asking which way,

and it knows where the light comes from.

Marni Fraser

0612.2026

‘Hidden In Light’ | 06.2026

POEM: Here I Am

Here I Am (There I Was)

Here I am, and there I was—

a woman whole,

a woman closed into her own signal,

moving through the bars of my own build—

a light deciding,

a light asking,

“how much of itself to spend?”

I take photographs in motion.

The blur mine—

every fracture, composed.

Every strip of drift—chosen.

This is not vanishing,

it is the art of selective wound,

the self turned aperture,

open at the angle

for the true light to walk through.

Somewhere women are transforming

the ash only women make—

a symbol?

A soft-word martyr?

Or the body’s first language with fire.

I can’t burn beside them.

I can only remain light.

And remaining light is its own gravity—

a joy in knowing the price of joy

that hums this low and stubborn note

from the low and stubborn cellar

of the low and stubborn still-alive—

it’s the way a string keeps singing

after the hand and stick have lifted.

Here I am.

There I was.

Transmission incomplete,

yet sufficient.

The signal stuttered through interference,

and then finally arrived.

That is the whole wild mercy of it.

I am still this woman

who moves through her own fracture

and comes out of it incandescent.

Marni Fraser

0607.2026

Self Portrait | 06.2026

POEM: The Labels

The Labels

The kidneys mounted on a rod,

look like a question posed.

One has been opened.

Its interior of dark brocade,

the pattern filtering

everything given—

yet keeping none of it.

A label to be read—

as if the words are instruction.

As though the body requires

a reminder of what it was.

I’ve stood in front of magnificent canvases—

Nothing prepared me for this —

the inferior vena cava

extending into its branches

like a sentence endlessly qualifying itself.

Fluid holds this tree,

it does not erase its life—

but suspends it.

The chest cavity of the other frame —

lungs collapsed into a miniature nave,

ribs constructing a chamber

no one will enter —

and more intimate than most houses.

There is a logic to resemblance:

the brain's ventricles hold their still water.

The breast tissue, removed then placed on cloth,

look like two eyes that have stopped seeing.

I came because the body insists on form

even after it forgets its purpose,

even after the label falls off,

and even after the rod goes cold.

Marni Fraser

0611.2026

Specimen No. 4 | Renal Pair with Vasculature, Sectioned | 0608.2026 | Canon R | by Marni Fraser

POEM: Postictal

Postictal

Why call me, aura?

There is no God,

as your entirety

calls me

as if it is—

and my delirium

my joy are lifting

and rising, and lifting —

Adoration

Adulation.

Adoration.

Adulation.

Marni Fraser

Feb 23 2026

7:48pm

Ventricles | Cerebrum

Marni Fraser, 2026

Canon R

POEM: Between Our Departures

Between Our Departures

I don't know if they still hold Pennsic.

Maybe the city finally folded itself

into the long green hill, or the flat lands—

the roads surrendered to rain,

the banners sad, forgot the names

we stitched into them by lantern light.

Maybe the field has grown ordinary,

covered itself in clover and quiet,

its stillness as though thousands of us

had never raised a kingdom there.

But every August,

something in me still hears us.

The bright breaths of tiki torches.

A flute wandering through canvas walls.

The deep-throated tombek beneath my hands,

its goatskin trembling like my second heart.

The finger cymbals sang at my wrists.

An old gypsy taught me—

though he was no gypsy at all,

only Alex beneath a hundred stories,

grinning through woodsmoke

and moonlight.

And Rosanna,

that beautiful serpent,

sliding through the dancers

like a spell cast from another century.

Someone laughed in the dark.

I cannot remember their face,

only that they pressed me a cup of mead,

passed me a sweet green smoke,

and braided a bell into my hair.

First there was Wolf Camp.

Then the Tuchux—

I paid the barbarians passage

with the pale coin of my breast.

Then Esmeralda,

and twenty drummers in a circle,

and me among them,

playing until pain became bliss

and rhythm turned to ecstasy.

By day the armies marched.

Men vanished inside shining plate armor,

becoming iron saints beneath the sun.

The East fought the Midrealm

for the glory of Pittsburgh,

which seemed at the time

as noble a prize as Troy.

And afterward—

after the bruises,

the dust,

the heat—

Pop-tarts,

and a red-roasted pig turned slow on the spit

while darkness gathered in the trees.

We danced and drank until delirium found us.

We danced until the stars burned out.

Until sweat and torchlight

burned us back to body.

Until every path through the woods

opened into another fire,

another camp,

another welcome,

another song.

Every farewell already contained

the seed of a return.

We were always leaving Pennsic.

Even while we were there,

we were already mourning it,

already promising one another

next summer,

next summer,

next summer.

And still we returned.

Year after year,

building a kingdom from rope,

canvas, woodsmoke, and stubbornness.

Now the years themselves

have become the campground.

Whole neighborhoods of memory

have gone to seed beneath the pines.

I walked them once at dusk,

too many years ago—

I remember the gate.

A song.

A glimpse of someone impossibly beautiful

turning away the way beautiful things do—

without any way to explain it.

No—

they must still hold Pennsic.

Because some nights

I hear it singing and dancing

just beyond the edge of sleep.

The drums begin first.

Then the strings.

Then distant laughter through the trees.

And a voice I almost recognize

calls softly from the dark:

Rise, Marni.

We've been waiting.

Come away, come away.

Marni Fraser

0603.2026

Self-Portrait
Marni Fraser
June 4, 2026

POEM: The Last

The Last

Between then and now—

the puncturevine ravines,

thorns that crowned our feet, how holy,

rattlesnakes threading the current,

water dragging where we'd go,

peeling us from the stone

and carrying us laughing

toward whatever ending

(We never cared.)

Pie warm on her one hundred and twelve degree window sill—

Ants bright as fired rubies.

Our grandmother in her seventies,

bent to the thistle, tugging,

the sun hammering the desert

into its final making—

and her, still prosecuting weeds.

The cats never had tails.

I never thought to ask,

they seemed half rabbit,

that day near the ravine.

The next, the lake—

fish in the weeds, hot spring—

hot enough to cook the body brought into it.

The whole country of that summer

wanted to bite, sting, burn, drag, drown—

and we moved through it

like we were made of the same material.

Our laughter still lives out there somewhere

in the scrub

and the heat's shimmer.

I went back and could hear it.

I went back

and found it resting

in our grandmother's hands.

Not lost.

Only carried.

Taken

wherever the hands

de nuestra familia go.

We didn't know we were lithe

through the last,

Marni Fraser

0601.2026

Photo | 02.2026

POEM: The Reason

The Reason

I

Love

You

Because

Your hands

Swim like

Restless

Red fish

Marni Fraser

0602.2026

‘Red Fish’

8x10, color sketch

POEM: The Stone

The Stone

A moth's wing is folded so still inside a closed fist.

That is what waiting is like—

something pressing between palms,

neither crushed nor released—

How dangerous.

Tonight the heart has a bite.

And tonight the fire comes early.

It laces the grass with silver wire

and turns my breath to glass.

My knees find the death of a lost dream.

How it chews through some stone half-buried between the soles of my boots—

Between my thighs—

cherry stone alone,

—unloved.

Then I brought my ear to the ground

and heard the stone again tonight.

and then I heard nothing.

Not silence

Not for any reason—

not the absence I can name.

It sits in our silence.

A hum so low in my pocket,

A note uncaptured in the air.

Marni Fraser

0601.2026

Self Portrait | 0108.2020

POETRY: Queen of the Night

Queen of the Night

Selenicereus, Epiphyllum, Dahlia —

their bodies are chapels

where I stood among them.

But I keep returning to one

who hides her whole year

as a dead thing —

thin stems, grey as death,

unread against the creosote

until the night opens her

like a secret kept so long

it became her tender nature.

She blooms in heat,

hung in the stillness,

just after the bats have finished

their swooping hunts under the last light,

after the desert has exhaled

its entire day of indifference.

Her scent arrives before she does —

vanilla and a thing older,

something the dark manufactures

only once, here, and only now —

and it lingers as certain loss lingers:

settling deeper into the air

until the air is made of it.

Bougainvillea, Saguaro blossom, Desert Mariposa —

I have loved their extravagance,

their willingness to be seen.

But Peniocereus greggii

does not have to seek her attentions.

She carries her heart in an underground

that outlives a century—

every drought, every silence,

every year she was without a future.

Her tepals: white, shining,

cream at the interior, faintly pink

where the night touches the edge.

Her stamens are filament-fine,

one hundred pale threads

holding a pale center,

and she offers all of it

once —

fully —

to her lover hawk moth

who finds her by scent alone

through absolute darkness,

who needs no light

to know what she is.

Moonflower, Sacred Datura, Evening Primrose —

all of them opening toward the dark.

All of them lovely.

None of them her.

I return because she makes no sound.

Because she closes before the sun.

Because what she gives

she gives entirely —

She has been keeping her promise

since before I knew

that a promise kept in darkness

is the only promise kept.

Marni Fraser

0516.2026 | Marni Fraser

5:19am

•Queen of the Night by Marni Fraser 2026

•Safford Arizona

•Arizona Desert Vigil | Edition [10 of 10]

POEM: ARDENT

ARDENT

I was ardent once.

A small fire keeping another fire.

I would have laid my body down

like a coat over broken glass —

like love over the mouth of a grave.

I was gullible in the old way.

Open-faced.

Certain kindness meant kindness.

Certain hands arrived without hidden plans.

I carried my heart lit inside me

like a paper lantern in black weather,

swaying,

convinced the wind was not wind.

Then came the careful theater of masks.

The hand extended and the door already closing.

My longing dragged across a red door

not meant for opening.

It is a particular cruelty —

to call someone toward you

only for exile at the door,

to hold a candle to a woman's face

and study her warmth

while standing fully in the cold.

I waited—

translated silence into promise

(as if desperation will ever bear fruit.)

There is a bird that keeps its song

past the falling day —

not because of its courage

but because it has forgotten

what the silence means.

I was that bird.

And why —

why speak my name like it is precious,

why press tenderness into the pit of my heart like a key

to no lock,

why bring me to the threshold

of every room I was not allowed to enter?

There are defeats constructed long before arrival.

Walls that look like welcome

until you are inside them.

Still you led me.

And still I followed —

light in my hands,

throat full of salt water.

Now I move through the days

weighted only by this:

how long I stood in that light,

how long to let myself be seen

by someone who had already

turned away from the window.

Marni Fraser

0526.2026 | Marni Fraser

3:41am

•Unwitnessed by Marni Fraser 2026

•Yuma Arizona | Photoshop Edits

•Arizona Desert Vigil | Edition [9 of 10]

•Canon EOS R5 | Just after the first light.

POEM: The Last Green Thing

The Last Green Thing

I remember when darkness had its light rim,

when night was a word the window let in,

and someone warm stood between me and the chill

waiting tenderly, patient and entitled.

I remember when the world hadn’t yet learned

to press its full weight through a single hour,

and curiosity ran green and unashamed

through the too ordinary, and unremarkable days,

before the body began noticing its own dying,

before the seasons charged a toll for their joy,

before the flowers lost the thing they were

when I still believed in what they showed.

Do you remember just existing —

I was a stone existing, or the air,

without the cost of it,

without a history following each sigh.

Even the bad years made their damage lightly, then.

Even grief was something I could put aside.

I used to want to slip out of my skin

like a woman slipping from the party early,

quietly, without a scene,

and become someone else entirely —

someone lighter, better, rebegun.

I tried, and was good at it.

I turned myself to sunshine, seasons light,

I gave my brightest pieces to whoever might need them,

and called it love, and sometimes it really was.

Now reinvention costs way too much.

The compassion I keep clean is way too thin

at the places I kept folding it.

The flowers are still flowers.

The seasons still arrive, still bring their joys.

But they are doing it without me now,

maybe I stand watching from behind glass,

raising no fist against the cold of it.

Hurry, ending.

I have set the table.

I have laid out everything I mean to keep —

the color of the light in certain rooms,

the soft fading green light of being young and not yet aware,

how a future used to feel like something good coming,

its promise so large.

I am burning it all now, no fighting it,

the old woman burning her letters —

not angry,

not grieving exactly,

just to be done with the futility.

Come and take what's left.

I am now awaiting you.

I have been practicing this

my whole life.

Marni Fraser

0525.2026 | 8:43pm

Self Portrait | 2026

Poem: Hearing

Hearing

I can barely sit with myself.

I can barely sit.

I remember a laugh and think: real.

I think: too real.

Yet I’m wearing betrayal again

The same skin as the other million I cannot locate.

The night.

I hope the night.

So black the black can’t breathe—

Let it be fast.

Let it be so fast

it doesn’t get my name.

I remember your laugh.

I am hearing it.

Still.

Marni Fraser

0522.2026

Photo by Albarran Cabrera

POEM: Stupid Me

Stupid Me

The sun puts a black coin in my eye.

I spend it.

A raindrop falls without clouds.

I thank the sky anyway.

The snake smiles.

I say, nice teeth.

The rose has thorns.

I say, so do I, once.

I die on Tuesdays mostly.

By Wednesday I have forgotten

what dying taught me.

The earth dances.

I know this.

I watch it from the edge

where I keep going back

to see if this time

the thing in the wind

is something other than

the thing in the wind.

It never is.

I still believe you.

I still believe you.

I still believe you.

The sun puts a black coin in my eye.

I spend it again.

Marni Fraser

0522.2016

•by Marni Fraser 2026

•Yuma Arizona | Photoshop Edits

•Arizona Desert Vigil | Edition [3of 10]

POEM: There Are Beings

There Are Beings

I.

There are creatures—

and I can scarcely say it without the word

turning to nothing in the saying —

there are beings

who want to end you

even as they drink in your light,

even as they’re full on your gentleness,

the water they intend to waste.

II.

They come as the winter in wool,

diamonds cold as an open eye,

spring folded into a fist.

They want to widen the locked gate,

part the ribs like curtains,

go into the red-room

and call it home.

III.

First the mind comes —

always first the mind,

bright as a fast flint,

the mouth coiled and erudite dark,

the voice a flute

played by something

that has no fingers.

You begin, god help you,

to love even its snarles.

IV.

There are those in this world

who cannot bear a woman

walking into her own wisdom,

who would rather she remain

the unlit candle,

the unread page,

the garden walled

before the first blooms open.

V.

Their fear is old iron-girded.

It has the first denial,

the first fire stolen from woman’s hands

and renamed her discovery.

VI.

There are creatures —

I can scarcely hold the full weight of it —

who hate the very vessel

that cracked open

and gave them their first breath,

who take the compass of compassion

a woman pressed into their chest

and use it to find their way

back to her throat.

Marni Fraser

0519.2026

Photo by Marni Fraser | 2026

POEM: Brown Eyed Boy

Brown Eyed Boy

Brown eyed boy, where are you?

You are nobody I’ve known this life.

We have never stood inside a mirror together —

never climbed the other’s eyes,

never passed the alphabet between us

Never broke anything together like bread.

Not this time.

Not this body.

Not this name.

Where are you, brown eyed boy?

What dune are you standing on,

your feet sinking slow

into what was once an ocean?

I have seen you reaching

through the strangest dark

-a dark so dark it vanishes the dark—

that only the alone know how to make.

Perhaps you are already here —

wearing a white man’s clothing,

your eyes no longer black

but blue from a ransomed country.

As I am poured

into a white woman’s skin,

my eyes gone green

with the translation.

Marni Fraser | 0119.2026

Yuma Arizona | by Marni Fraser

Arizona Desert Vigil Series | 1 of 10