Five Poems by Marc Frazier

 

          The Way Here

My memory rushes in

and recedes like dulse.

There is, I recall, a chandelier of bones

In Sedleck Ossuary where over 50,000 bones

lie in the chapel for decoration or furnishing.

 

Contrast this with:

Gold-coloured chrysalis, imago,

Quiescent pupa of a butterfly.

What wonders we don’t choose.

 

I hone my survival skills

Like an early hominid sharpened

Its resolve to evolve.

Blood smells the same, he told me,

In animals and humans.

 

Sun bleached driftwood marooned,

Shorn of life, or is it?

Is anything around me dead

Or does thinking make it so?

 

This is what I’m left with:

A sun that bakes me into a loaf of contentment,

Spores in caverns, resin,

A semaphore of pirouettes,

 

The yellow of blossoming furse,

Nightmoths parsing air,

The rebellious jinn leading me astray,

Birdclaws, sedge, a nest’s tufts of hair.

 

I forgive everyone.

 

 

Moving

 

No one asked me and my sibs

how we felt as

day by day our house dwindled/

 

Part of me was excited for what

lie ahead/Another part wanted

to keep my head under water

 

Mother fought with father about a lamp

he said was attached and had to stay

while she cried as she’d saved so many

 

Green Stamps to get it—a thing of one’s own/

And I was jealous she didn’t fear his black belt

Each morning I counted the days

 

‘til we moved to another small town in the corn belt/

I wished I’d soon be in a land

without wrath, preferably fatherless/

 

The empath Sister Therese Marie knew how often

I hurt and shored me up

by having me lead classmates in prayer

 

The day arrived and us children huddled outside

in the cold/My organized German father on edge

but knowing where everything should go

 

including us as we scrambled in the back seat

the back of the station wagon wriggling

and bouncing without seat belts into

 

what was already the aftermath 

         What I’m Thinking During Therapy

I want to go to the arboretum and cry on fallen leaves.

I don’t want to know what notes I should taste in my coffee.

I was told God is forgiving, that he is wrathful.

We can revisit that next time.

I just want to live on chocolate croissants and brioche, laugh when someone falls.

Ms. Pastan said even repented sins are ours for good.

My favorite class was English because the teacher had to accept what you said.

Sounds like your parents were always worried about…

Sounds like you could benefit from some self-help books.

I think it may all have come from too many Fruit Loops mixed with Jello.

There is a gauze of grief under my face.

Where did you go?

There should be a statute of limitations on how long children have to agree.

I want refunds from awful ZOOM workshops where jags don’t mute.

What is your body feeling right now?

My massage therapist wears a yarmulke and groans too much.

I can still feel the soapy rough washcloth my father scrubbed too hard on my back.

His hands working overtime on my genitals.

How do you think that serves you in the long run?

I used to love holidays before I knew how many existed in the world.

What does the death certificate say for someone of a leap year?

Consider where you’ve come from.

I resent my neighbors’ bleeding-heart yard signs: hate needs a home too.

Perhaps gulls will refuse to be painted, or autumn leaves, or sky.

The problems all begin when you see how other people live.

Maybe we should shelve that for now.

My mother used towels until the fibers barely held them together.

I want to forget the childhood taste of Swanson pot pies and fish sticks.

Why wouldn’t rain fall on the just and the unjust.

Remember what you learned in A. A.

When I drank, I felt like everyone else.

It’s disaster we’re drawn to after all.

We’re out of time.

 

 

Shifting

—after The Sheltering Sky book by Paul Bowles and film by Bernardo Bertolucci

 

There are many ways to abandon oneself.

 

How did Kit come to be here in the desert

content to leave behind her American self.

She bounces on a camel’s back,

existential blankness on her browning face.

A bright hijab wraps her head and neck,

desert winds to no effect as she is full with heat.

 

 

Her husband, Port, deserts her by dying

 

at a Foreign Legion post in the North African desert,

sands shifting as she stares out the one window. —

He insisted they were travellers, not tourists.

Fine distinctions worthless to her now

having deserted her old culture, her old self.

Is she becoming someone else or no one?

 

 

Soon her Bedouin lifestyle, her young,

 

new lover take her to a world of forgetting, her grief

expressed in one breath, sensual delight in another,

unsure if she’s being held captive as they fuck—

identity a fluid thing.

Her old elite crowd talked and talked.

How little language matters,

though she and her brown lover share the names

of body parts in their languages.

 

 

She can’t stop moving.

 

Somehow arriving back to where she and Port started,

Tattooed, nearly catatonic—a mud pot—all form,

an American former friend (for she is friendless)

finds her and arranges a journey back to the states

but she refuses, also countryless now

she moves back into sand settling behind her,

pathless, a traveller under the sheltering sky.

 

 

What Does it Take to be Happy?

 

I imagine you and me rowing a boat. Then would you talk to me as we face one another directly? Will the water rippling off the hull please you? The blue sky and the sight of green forest on the shores? You don’t have to believe in God to see something more than what is there. As a child I saw a hummingbird and couldn’t breathe in astonishment. I couldn’t move that fast and wondered why. I rushed to my mother excited. Has anything like this happened to you? You’re actually putting some effort now in rowing our boat and we actually have a sort of rhythm. You almost look content. Are we now bonding in a way similar to trust exercises at a retreat? (Was it something I said? The way I dressed? Was I politically incorrect? I have my bad days too. Weren’t you taught to give everyone the benefit of the doubt like I was, though I could never really do it.) The weather is perfect, I say hoping to crack open silence, knowing you’ll find this remark completely banal. You make a great Canadian latte, I add. I can barely tell, but I think I see a tiny smile leak like intimacy through a small crack in our boat.

Marc Frazier has published poetry in over a hundred literary journals. He has also published memoir, fiction, essays and reviews of poetry collections. Marc, the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and two “best of the nets.” He is a Chicago area, LGBTQ writer whose three full-length poetry collections are available online. He is active on social media especially his Marc Frazier Author page on Facebook.