Five Poems by M. Frost

 

the hollow inside

 

not emptiness but hunger

not parchment but thirst

not void but craving

not darkness but endless quest for light 

 

Bleeding Heart 

 

Since I became Empire—person and domain—the long squares of my land

are all I can see. They say my heart bleeds because I want to rip out all

the straight lines, pull down the boundaries I once built to keep us clean.

                                                        I want to escape,

 

find the river, follow it to a primordial root, swim through

its inhalation, lungs of the world that take in all the dust I have made,

let it sediment in the eddies and spins, impact upon its bifurcations.

 

I bleed, my chest heaves, dust impacts on the bifurcations, the thick muscle

of my aortic valve thrusting blood into my lungs for oxygen. Since I became Empire,

the clean and the unclean are joined, carved from me in straight and broken lines,

 

cut off from a tributary of red, the forbidden path that has governed my heart

                                                        since I became Empire. 

 

Keeper of the Scarab

 

The carcass of the beetle has graced

my car’s dashboard for weeks. I think of insects

on satin display, brilliant colors preserved, gold-

green iridescent shell reflecting a spotted light

 

What is this impulse to craft a reliquary for the daily detritus of death?

 

To capture a pearl-headed pin in thin fingers

to press it through the chitin, bury it in a foam-

nest beneath the red or black lining, catch a

silver clasp, join stained wood 

 

Gargoyle of Notre Dame

 

Capture lightning

Prisms through a stained-glass window catch the sun’s

ultimate pillar of light. Twilight empties the church.

Candles blaze only to expire in gutters of wax. The gargoyle,

guardian, gray-blue skin etched in shadows, vacates himself from

a stone-metal sconce to creep down bell-shafts and columns

to reach the nave. There’s a moment—ghost lungs of choirs

rising in the air—when he pauses, lifts his wings, bares teeth.

 

Conjure water as if it were flame

His job is to regurgitate rain, convey it, unbroken, from its path

between heaven and earth. Engineer, he survived years of water

and fire. He took the damage upon himself, loyal worker

unheralded. He enters the nave, stretches clay wings.

 

Repeat and repeat, like an endless storm

Wisps of smoke mark his display, charcoal stains of resilience.

What do you hope to see here? What lines drawn from

transcript to floor, enduring scores, like water against stone,

etching it the way only water can. What does the Gargoyle sing

when he enters the nave? His throat stopped with the flood, every note

a gurgle, the rush of storms, the lightning that catches the spire,

the summit that juts out, leaden, a feat impossible to hold.

 

Guard the nave with just this solitary note 

 

The Tropes 

 

I get how the ruggedly handsome hero

saving the equally comely princess

from the tower of evil mages

might be a thing

done enough

 

But I submit that when the princess

shrugs the prince off,

picks up her weapon

aims it at her

abusers

 

this needs to be done again

         and again

                   and again

M. Frost - The creative work of M. Frost appears in Strange Horizons, Star*Line, Orion’s Belt, and many others, with chapbooks Cow Poetry (Finishing Line Press, 2006) and The Women of Myth (Island of Wak-Wak, 2025), as well as Constellation, a collaboration with artist brother (CreateSpace, 2013). Explore further at mfrostwords.com and follow @mfrostwords.bsky.social.

Meghan F. Davis (M. Frost)