Marc J. Frazier

No women wail for the king’s mercy.
No mercy.

Pounds of flesh strung from telephone wire,
a ten-year-old’s heel on a burned head—

the public and the profane.
At the bridge of hanging corpses

three nurses scurry at gunpoint.
In falling light, this fleeting witness—

bathers of babes, cocoons of hope,
the endured, the almost.

 

Marc J. Frazier has appeared in The Spoon River Poetry Review, ACM, Ascent, Permafrost, Plainsongs, Poet Lore, Rhino, among many others. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for poetry and the author of The Way Here, a full-length poetry collection and two chapbooks. His second full-length collection, Each Thing Touches, is from Glass Lyre Press, 2015. Visit www.marcfrazier.org.