Vernon Frazer




Category One


Coriander hurricane tabla
taps its cramps below
the rain, seeks footage


in penumbra. Gathering
the guise of moss
to stone the curried habitat


of oscillation’s trigger
carries numbers forward
to alleged slumber rallies.


At the rainbow market
a gift of grab prevails
over a trailing sunset.


Raging vampire creek
looks across the ledge
near a sleek-lined obelisk,


pontoons notwithstanding.
The married weight carried
slowly. To the aching cast,


its lumbering drama delayed,
catcalls lift verbiage ladders
toward rumored silt. Ledges

pledging triangular wisdom
to the tending portents
leak their claustrophobic secret




Fade to Real



Paranoiacs tilting at the veil
uplift their own surveillance pleasures.
For most adrift, the semblance
seeds its avenued longing,
the essence of past departures.
Casting the art of new appliance yearning,
the bastion retreats from ranking travesties
to surly etudes on loan. Where lilting
protests fall short of tearing the invisible
enemy’s reproach, tales shuffling
the vapors of chronology fixtures
lament the fractured ambulance lesion.
Attuning them to narrative recriminations
soon to be bargained at the onslaught
for vacant amenities, their plenitude
amasses the weary for a dead legato,
pressed against their droning
fortunes. Surely, ambivalence greets
the storied wilt. The males scuffle
till past intruders shout lewdly at co-fixtures
traded to futures on an easy buyout.
Necropolis fortunes await, seedy emblems
toiling at needs whose saturation frees
scalpels. For uncharged surfeits
a renewed maturation teases the boil
before bubbles froth their true allegiance
to graveyard shuttles. Inkling tastes of
matador caviar, their retrenchment
continues before alarmists imbue their
shading presence with a slow fade,
lecturing to hosts of loose assemblies




Naturally Birthing


Autonomic fibrillation massacre
incumbents a portal, swelling dividend.
A legend for arable distortion. More
repositories cling to the utmost endangerment
as apportioned, the mottled safety catchers
filing the turbid course. While a hoarse adagio
flings the sutures bred. As it occurred,
the singing heads launched a future mottle.
An eye missing in the morning caught the bite
of the saber’s tooth. A lunge of the mute
revived the farm’s recidivist splendor.
No backing pursued its claim, nor the stamens
necessary for hatching. In the background
no foregrounding: a burrowing placenta
kneels in the weight before its teething.
Vacant panoramas spread distortion
across a pampered eye. Welling the bred
against the portico ruin dampens incantation
as a mixture. A trestle against the dislodged
resists its fabrication. Anomaly fixtures berate
the steady flows to the parsing redound.
A garden area fuselage restores
the ostrich feathers to the mix in protest
against the anointed paradigm, shifting
its nature as always or before.





Vernon Frazer has published eight books of poetry, including the longpoem IMPROVISATIONS, and three books of fiction. His work has appeared in Aught, Big Bridge, Drunken Boat, Exquisite Corpse, First Intensity, Golden Handcuffs Review, Jack Magazine, Lost and Found Times, Moria,, Otoliths and many other literary magazines. His most recent book is the longpoem EMBLEMATIC MOON. His web site is http://vernonfrazer.net. Frazer is married and lives in South Florida.