Marc Frazier

 
Born Again
 
How could I possibly have been born here? How does one breathe?
Marc Chagall
 
The artist claims to have been born dead. Does this mean when he finally breathed, he was bringing to life his original story or a new one that had just enough time to emerge? This is assuming we’re born with our own stories and just have to live them. Kind of like a Deist’s clock. Nothing like slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Nothing like the greatest story ever told. The poet’s vision contains circles of hell or the mists of Avalon. The artist returns to his village in Belarus. It was so long ago but it’s like today. What he lacked as a child he will always lack. To one degree or another. But his past never happened until he painted it. A tear in the universe, the clockmaker made impotent. When I walk and suddenly see his blue windows at the Art Institute I know there is God. And that He is close to him with his images of angels, his stories from the Bible. Then there are also versions of himself, the woman juggler, the circus in yellow. It is all there. We are all there. 
 
**
 
Frozen Beauty
 
You once told me you loved Michelangelo, being one of the women who come and go. What is most intriguing is not that he knew beauty but how romantic his name sounds: like Giancarlo Giannini, Marcelo Mastroianni. These names make me want to say pronto or prosciutto. To wander into a church and gawk at chapel-veiled women. Growing up I never knew Italians. Just one family who were neighbours and went to our church. Catholic, of course. I wondered if they were considered white. I ended up being a pall bearer in eighth grade for their little girl Maria who used to follow me and my buddies to school. My father dragged me to the wake where I kneeled over the open casket and stared down at her body—a kind of frozen beauty, her white plastic First Communion rosary laced around her fingers. I didn’t spend much time wondering what made someone Italian. I was thinking about dressing for the funeral and how heavy the casket would be. 
 
**

More of the Same
 
Heat trapped in the kitchen when mother cans tomatoes in summer, her telling us after dad dies how much she hated doing this, how much she did out of fear of my father. How much we all did out of fear of my father. The melodic taste of chocolate milk at recess—the cartons rolled in on carts. The smell of patchouli on the first man I slept with. Falling in love with my best friend. When I couldn’t get up from bed. The panic when a bar closes in fifteen minutes. The circus at Masonic Temple—the clown’s fake flowers. All I can do is repeat myself. Reinventing oneself is overrated. Things stay. Look how petunias repeat or the hydrangea bush sticks to its one color—more of it each year. The cardinals copyright their chirp. Sometimes one is surprised by flower anarchy: the spreading tendrils and half-open buds, the overgrown wildflowers in my neighbour’s yard.  Look at the squash repeating its blossoming reach, threatening to dominate the garden. One can’t stop a tomato plant from repeating its red gifts. I listen to a mother call in her child at dusk, robins settling into the quiet dark, the orchid flutter in breeze, focus on the beauty of sameness. But that’s not quite right. Things end. But even endings repeat. Our daily bread is an origami bird unfolding and unfolding to reveal the creases that make the bird disappear.

**

A Nest for Father
 
We all heard them but weren’t sure what the sound was. Our Father discovered the little swifts in the chimney. Like all adults he found so many things a nuisance. A bother. They just needed to be dealt with. I felt their hunger. Where was their mother? That she was missing alarmed me. Mother, as usual, stood silent and off to the side. Father walked to the garage, got a bucket, and filled it three quarters full with water from the now-menacing green hose. He then came in and grabbed the little birds, still chirping, feeling no warmth in the palms of his hands, carried them to the bucket where he dropped them into the water. What children have to witness really hurts. When he finished his task, he looked strange. Was it pride in a task well done? Now I won’t look away when he menaces me or he wins. One thing’s for sure: I never know what will happen next.
 
**
 
Business as Usual
 
As soon as the door opens from one el car to another and the poor, raggedy individual walks in, tufts of hair tangled, we readjust ourselves in our seats as if the weather has suddenly changed, and avert our eyes from the panhandler reciting his prepared spiel on why he needs help, reft of egress, a crow cawing, circling, and it’s obvious that his need is real, and often it’s the people who look needy themselves who drop something in the Burger King cup everlasting he holds out while many think this is a scam, the money will go for alcohol or drugs as our eyes go to books, phones, the floor, the wide-open, neutral sky smeared by the filthy windows, our thoughts elsewhere as we wish the person would go away or, in fact, regret he’d ever entered our lives as his murmurations bring too many reminders of our own feared failures.
 
**
 
The Bistro
 
The disco ball throws shafts of coloured light through us as we dance to “Superfreak.” Liza was here is all I can think as I gyrate with a man sniffing poppers who twirls like a bulky ballerina. Wednesday night—a work night—and nobody cares. This is the place to be, blending into the crowd as it becomes one throbbing set of movements loosed—a microburst of energy. Liza was here. “She Works Hard for the Money” blares and a scream goes up from all the queens who will later disown her, want to throw a pie in her face like one of them did to Anita Bryant. We are in the moment, not yet facing the many deaths that will thin out dance floors all over Chicago like a game of pick-up sticks. For now, we’re skipping class, joyriding, sliding down that slippery slope, shoplifting, playing chicken in cars in a dark parking lot, working to steal the limelight—all Leos shining at the same time. Dizzy for days.
 
**
 
The Awful Roaring Toward God
 
after Anne Sexton’s The Awful Rowing Toward God
 
I like roars extra drama though there’s much to be said for understatement. The small boat of my life lost in the waters. At times I think I know where I’m headed. I row but remain still, the boat moored in the water, its helmsman: sun bleached, helpless. Marooned. This stasis leaves me stranded from myself with roaring in my head. Poems cry in the night. During the day I examine them for clues, flashes of insight, as I attempt to rectify my doubt. I tire of rowing I tell you that. I tell God that. Suffering is a given Buddha said. A dream of salvation washes over me in waves that don’t move me but keep me married to the orderly’s padded shoes, the locked door, the jumble of words that will one day be thrown like dice onto the page. That is if my hands still know what to do with themselves. That is if I still have a thimbleful of understanding. This is what it means to be human: to pray when you least expect God, strangled by the things of this world.
 
**
 
Marc Frazier has published poetry in over a hundred journals both online and in print. A recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry, he has also been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two “Best of the Nets.” He’s published poetry, essays, flash fiction, fiction, photographs, book reviews, and memoir. Marc’s four books are available online. His latest poetry book If It Comes To That recently won Silver in the Florida Writers Association best published anthology category. Marc, an LGBTQ author, can be found on his Marc Frazier Author page on Facebook and website www.marcfrazierwrites.com. X @marcfrazier45, Insta mcfj45.