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
♠️ : Monday Morning 9:32am.
The coffee smells richer today. I don't know why. Maybe because I'm paying attention again. Maybe because for the first time in months my mind isn't running down the same corridor of questions, wearing thin grooves into itself. This morning I skip the cream. Black is more myself, sharper. The sugar is also enough to remind me that there is still sweetness in me, because lately that has felt uncertain.
The eggs are almost done. The sausages too. One cat is asleep on the chair beside me while the other makes her usual rounds through the house, stopping occasionally to make sure I am still where she left me. The day is really quite ordinary — calm in a way that reminds me of childhood days. That is the strange thing. The day is perfectly ordinary, and yet I am sitting here trying to explain how a person can lose so much of herself without ever leaving the room.
There was a period where I stopped drawing. It wasn't a complete stop. Just enough to scare me. People who don't make things won't understand that sentence, but artists will:
First you stop looking forward to the work. Then you stop opening the sketchbook. Next, the pencils remain where you left them. Then entire afternoons disappear. Suddenly one morning you realize weeks have gone by and you've spent them staring at a wall instead of making anything at all. That is how something important leaves a person — never in a grand collapse, but slowly, through neglect and confusion and some horrible exhaustion with a thousand tiny cuts that seem insignificant until one day you discover they have carried away something you cannot easily replace.
You've lost your blood.
I have had enough loss for one lifetime already. Loved ones disappeared into homelessness and addiction. Other family I sought for years, died before they ever really met me. My grandmother, the only person who ever loved me with the sort of certainty that makes a child feel safe in the world, is gone. Jan arrived later than I needed her to, but she became one of the most steady people I have ever known. Jon also, and most important, whose wisdom and ceaseless belief in me has made me want to be better than I am.
So when I tell you that friendship mattered to me, I am not speaking casually. I am not talking about collecting contacts or passing time online. I am talking about something that occupied the same territory as trust.
What people misunderstand is that I was never looking for a savior or a therapist. I had hoped for one honest friend. A person I didn't have to translate myself for. One person I could send a sketch to at two in the morning and say, "I think this one is finally working." Someone I could talk to without feeling like every sentence needed armor bolted onto it first. That was all.
And maybe that is why this has hurt as much as it has. Not because I lost an illusion. It hurt because I offered trust after years spent learning how dangerous trust is, and what came back to me was confusion, ambiguity, silence, and questions that nobody would answer directly. The damage wasn't a single event. It accumulated. It settled over everything. It followed me to the desk and into the work. It followed me into rooms where it had no business being.
The strange thing is that none of this began in a dramatic way. There was no thunderclap, nor catastrophe. No moment where I could say, "That was the day everything changed." It began the way many important things in my life have begun. I met somebody, and over time they became important to me.
I think people are often embarrassed to admit that now. We live in a time where every connection is treated with suspicion and attachment is lowered into some ugly explanation. But sometimes another human being enters your life and you simply enjoy them. You enjoy talking and laughing with them. You enjoy hearing what they think, and find yourself looking forward to their messages. You often are wanting to share things — a song, a poem, a photograph, a drawing you just finished, a strange thought you had while making coffee in the morning. There is nothing remarkable about this. It is one of the most ordinary experiences in the world.
What made it remarkable was how rare it had become for me.
By the time this person arrived, I had already lost so much that I had stopped expecting very much from people. The older I get, the more I realize how many relationships are built upon convenience. People drift in and out. They become busy, or disappear. They might move away, or they die. Eventually you stop expecting permanence and begin appreciating whatever time you have with someone while it exists. So when I found a friendship that felt easy, natural, and meaningful, I valued it. Maybe more than I should have.
The truth is that I trusted this person. I trusted them enough to lower my guard and speak honestly. I was comfortable enough to show them parts of myself that I normally keep protected. That may not sound extraordinary to some people, but for me it was. Trust is dangerous when you've spent most of your life learning how fragile it can be.
And then something began changing. I wish I could tell you it was obvious, or that there was a single event, a single betrayal, a single conversation that explained everything. Instead there was a growing sense that something was wrong and nobody was willing to say what it was. The friendship remained, but it no longer felt uncomplicated. Questions appeared where certainty used to be. What troubled me deeply was how things stopped fitting together in ways that started familiar — and I found myself doing what human beings always do when they care about something that suddenly stops making sense.
I tried to understand it.
What followed was not dramatic betrayals. There was no confrontation. Instead there was a slow accumulation — dates, intervals, behavior across months. Accounts that appeared and vanished. Timing too precise to be coincidental. Then the arrival of a network of activity circling something that should have been simple, operating with a consistency and coordination that eventually became impossible to explain away. I needed to trust my own eyes. I compared notes with people whose judgment I trusted. What began as uncertainty eventually became something I could no longer reasonably doubt — though I was under no illusion that I could prove it to anyone else’s satisfaction. That is the strange loneliness of knowing something you cannot fully demonstrate.
The strange thing is that certainty didn't bring relief. I had spent so long trying to understand what was happening that by the time I reached my own conclusions, I was exhausted. Somewhere along the way I realized I had been spending more energy trying to understand the activity around me, than I was in understanding myself. That cost me more than the situation itself.
My friend eventually returned. But by then something fundamental had changed in me. Explanations did not feel honest. I had spent enough time learning truth to recognize when something is off. One of the great advantages of getting older is that eventually you stop arguing with your own instincts. You may not always understand them immediately, but you learn to respect them.
When I look now at the people who spent so much time watching, circling, inserting themselves into something that did not belong to them, I no longer feel threatened. Mostly I feel puzzled. There is a level of insecurity required to organize your life around another person's attention that I simply do not understand. I had known this person only a short while before the interference began — accounts deleting themselves, reappearing under same profiles, different names — or same names, different profile. Possible accounts ran by two persons. Behavior so coordinated it could not have been accidental. And I was told it was resolved. And it was not resolved. Whatever fears were driving those actions were never my issue. I did not cause them by my actions. They belonged to somebody else. The mistake was allowing those fears to become my problem.
I am actually a very uncomplicated person. I do not enjoy competition unless it is friendly and among people I care about. I do not enjoy games unless of the intellectual kind. I do not enjoy power struggles, triangulation, jealousy, or endless psychological maneuvering. The older I get, the faster I leave situations that require those things. There was a time when I would stay and try to understand, or at least try to repair something that was never mine to deal with. That time is long since passed.
The truth is that I had to reclaim my life. Nobody was going to do it for me. So I returned to the things that have always sustained me. Visual art. Books. I filled my home with beauty. I spent time with friends. I went out when every instinct told me to stay home. For somebody as introverted as I am, that was its own act of self-preservation.
And perhaps that is the part nobody expected. Whatever the goal was — distraction, destabilization, confusion, noise — I ended up learning something about myself instead. I learned that I can survive ambiguity. I can survive disappointment. I can survive losing people I once believed would remain in my life. What I could not survive, and would not, was continuing to offer honesty to someone who had chosen not to return it. When you enter a friendship knowing you intend to harm the person inside it, you are a thief. You have stolen the truth from them. And in doing so you have surrendered your own.
Most importantly, I always knew my peace is my responsibility. Once I finally returned to my modus-operandi, everything became much simpler.
The coffee still tastes good. The cats still make their rounds. My sketchbooks are open again. I did the right thing to let go.
Self | Nov 17 | 2025
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
PHOTO: Desert Vigil Series [6-10]
Canon EOS R5 | EF-mount macro adapted over — the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM
__________________
I needed time away but didn’t get enough. I returned to where I’m most haunted — the home of my grandmother. This is where I see the immense sun and take the most light. I can never go back.
What we abandon doesn’t sit waiting. It simply becomes someone else’s memory, or no one’s.
•Claret by Marni Fraser 2026
•Phoenix Arizona | Photoshop Edits
•Arizona Desert Vigil | Edition [6 of 10]
•Interior by Marni Fraser 2026
•Phoenix Arizona | Photoshop Edits
•Arizona Desert Vigil | Edition [7 of 10]
•Before by Marni Fraser 2026
•Phoenix Arizona | Photoshop Edits
•Arizona Desert Vigil | Edition [8 of 10]
Note: Battles
Losing Battles
It's been a while since I felt hopeful. I've never fit anywhere, including among other artists. Too aware. Too impatient. There are a million ways to help yourself and none of them work when you actually need one. I can't remember the last time I was happy. No artist should have to say that. It will kill them.
I'm not sure who cared. I'm not sure I do anymore.
I spent years trying. New habits, new ways of seeing, things sacrificed for self-protection and things risked anyway. I was brave. I gave a great deal and became very tired. The people who seemed, at certain moments, to have answers — they didn't, or they left, or both. The last year and a half have been the worst.
There is physical illness. There always has been. The mind used to compensate — used to steady me, give the work somewhere to go. The writing and painting felt like direction. Now they feel like evidence of something I almost became.
Abusive adults. Partners who hit or lied or simply couldn't stay. Friends who rewrote what happened until I doubted my own memory. I forgave quickly, not because I'm weak but because I understand people. That understanding cost me. They read it as a kind of permission.
At some point you start to think you're the problem. The only consistent variable is the one doing the choosing.
I'm tired. I've said it before and meant it before. There were attempts. One landed me in dialysis for eight hours. I made a rule after that. Never again.
The rule is changing.
Not loudly. Just a quiet shift — maybe, but differently this time. No coming back.
I don't have friends. No family. One person, elderly, who functions more as a parent than anything else. A husband once — we fought badly, him physically. He was a magnificent artist. I miss the artistic rapport we had together. I haven't found that since. Wine and paint nights are not the same thing.
And, my partner now, who deserves better. He’s put up with my complexity better than anyone else. He understands. Still, I’m burdensome.
I'm too serious and then too childlike and people find that difficult to hold. I don't fit. Feeling shunned has become familiar.
I tried therapy for five years. I wanted someone to listen, not prescribe. The prescribed pills made life unrecognizable to myself. I stopped them. I won't go back. What helped, eventually, was one clinician with enough experience to say the truth plainly — situational depression, not me, the weight of everything around me. That distinction mattered.
Then came the harassment. The surveillance. Being watched and mocked during the one period I was trying simply to work and be heard. . . I never harmed anyone. I minded my own life. It left damage anyway.
I doubt anyone can help. I doubt I can receive it even if they tried. I don't know if I believe in love anymore — not as something directed at me. I see beauty still, in small things. That hasn't gone. But love between people, reliable and specific — I've lost the thread of it.
People bore me now. Strangers less so, because there's no history, no accumulated weight underneath every exchange. With strangers I can be patient.
I have two people. I think I make them both miserable.
I've risen before. Many times. From worse, maybe, or at least from different. I know the mechanics of rising, the loop.
I'm not sure I want to do it again.
Broken. Gone. And ready.
M.
•The One Night by Marni Fraser 2026
•Phoenix Arizona | Photoshop Edits
•Arizona Desert Vigil | Edition [4of 10]
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
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
PHOTO:Age
Studies on aging gracefully.
Trying to understand the body without punishing it for changing.
There is a strange beauty in watching the self shift over time — in carrying the faces of those before us, and in carrying our age.
Perhaps grace begins there.
You cannot see my hand. It’s hidden in shadow, but beneath the shadow it is badly bruised. My blood has become thin, much more fragile. My bones suffer. Part of the reason I am trying to remove myself from others lives.
I do not lean on people anymore. Perhaps I no longer know how. Perhaps I have grown tired of reaching out, only to feel unseen.
I took these photographs because I am sick, and aging, and because some days I do not meet either reality with grace.
But all living things change. All bodies shift. All faces carry time …eventually.
So perhaps there is something holy in learning to look gently at ourselves as we disappear, and become.
Studies, May 14 2026
ESSAY: The Final Entrustment
I find, as I move further into age, there are no longer enough tears for the ache I carry through my body and spirit.
I find my patience widening into something nearly oceanic — longer, deeper, more forbearing than it once was — and yet, at the same time, I want only seclusion, because I no longer believe I will ever wholly entrust myself to another human being again.
It is such a foolish little cliché, isn’t it, to become a solitary artist.
And still, there is something grievous in the realization that I cannot truly trust anyone in this world. Even if the possibility were offered to me plainly, I do not believe I would reach for it now.
I continue to believe there is goodness. I continue to believe peace among people is attainable. Somewhere beneath all of this ruin, I still understand that most souls are laboring toward decency, honor, and tenderness.
Perhaps this was some covenant I made in another existence. Or perhaps I am truly as dreadful as I have sometimes been told I am. There have only been three people in my life who treated me with genuine regard.
Once your own mother tells you to take your life, you learn very quickly that love is either a pronunciation or an act — and the pronunciation is weightless. Only the act carries the gravity of truth.
After that, trust becomes a difficult country to inhabit. Still, you must attempt it, because without trust something interior begins to die quietly.
Well, I entrusted myself one final time, and now I can feel that interior death moving through me.
And yet there is still some small living ember inside me that refuses extinction, so I will not surrender it. I will simply remove it from the reach of others.
I tried so hard. I’m in pain.
And what is worse is that there are predatory souls in this world — people who will do anything to retain what they desire, even when the thing they desire does not desire them in return. They will diminish, harry, or dismantle anyone standing in the path of that hunger.
There are people who make sport of the human heart. They interfere with the minds and affections of others because the distortion itself exhilarates them; because it fortifies their private allegiances; because power, to them, is more intoxicating than sincerity ever could be.
Many people mistake this for amusement. It is not amusement not amusing. It is hideousness. Ugly. Low.
It is the antithesis of what we ought to be reaching toward as human beings. It is not love in any capacity.
And I believe that this appetite for domination — this culture and world (no matter the continent) of self-veneration, entitlement, emotional extraction, and spiritual indifference toward one another — is one of the very things undoing humanity itself.
I have reached my limit.
I am gone.
I am working quietly now. I have left social media. I no longer recognize any beauty in it. It has become disfigured. I’ve never known friends.
I am all right to update on my website. I know almost no one sees it, but at least I am sheltered from the grotesque appetites of dishonest people — people who do not truly care for anyone or anything, not even themselves, nor the friendships and loves they so casually profess.
M.
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
ESSAY: Untethered
Untethered
I am alone. But then again, I always was. I love freedom — the latitude of a body unmoored, moving through the world without the slow drag of someone else’s gravity calling itself devotion.
I’ve let something go, and am happier for it. I’ve become a red balloon rising, escaping — not fleeing, ascending — and I win. I don’t take this sordid prize. I win by being honest and possessing integrity, by moving on with my name still intact.
I realize I love people. It’s their lack of courage that breeds dishonesty — that gutless softening, that slow corrosion — that I can’t stand.
Me 2026