poems || Vernon Frazer

Lasting the Laugh


Cheese-laundering epithet ladles
scream barker's tush. Insomnia pellets
on the four-ply footage denounce

cataleptic mortgage rates, expect 
mispronounced baggage cart schisms 
to predict a flurried glory that pleases

centurion banners of empires past.
Archaic phrasing in the moment:
time recesses its playground constraint

until class distinctions progress,
a mean regression. A leaking grotto
seeks a known genuflection, its patter

a rather substantial vagary rephrased.
With lantern button capsules bearing 
water, no gunwale left to reflect on 

surface matters, none so much as 
concrete ladles. Wandering thumbnails 
hatch before the rise of yeast cakes:

a newly prescient vision, jodhpurs 
a tact against leverage cleavers overall,
maintenance-free cackling aside. 



A Place of One’s Owning


Radio clippings barter the low cascade.
A centrifuge leaks pandemonium faucets
in mottled currency, urgent parallels cleft 
as shown. The temblor brackets read 
the floor’s vibrato cache under headlines 
left to quell the urge for renewal.
Where vacant seats its overload, 
a carrion tractor slipping past elastic
memories shipped the bottled martyrs 
left to pledge. The ruminant oasis
flipped legends clipped as shadow mirage 
on back order. Appliance as rectitude magic 
unadorned or pasted as mentor glue to 
lower facets afforded explication. 
Their plangent sweeps prolonging underdone 
infusion, plasters where diadems sleek their 
slow fascination, near a shadowed ambuscade 
shipping radial chart meetings. Huge as 
emblematic coruscation packets darting 
dead urges to toboggan souffle, poseurs 
who distance head shredders from tumorous 
avocations rip cartilage ballads from the shaking 
numbers at flay in the peals of the board.
Anomalies lipping faster cackles clear to
starter tomes, grip readers by the home
cudgels near tracking levers that cleave
serpentine urges from pleasured flesh crones.
Verging, medically approved saturation pits
urge diagnostic threaders, eye-point needles
through varicose paternity. A lavish spread
eagled outward to semblance leaders
packeting the fabric called home to place
fireside crackles alongside amusements 
parked in the neighboring pit. Ferret hues 
come unglued at the stammer. Whistles in the night 
forebode the telling murmur, a half-sea dread 
regal as the perch of bottled urgency whose 
natal settings cast in a single stanza left to graze
the stagnant meat of its heart-felt emporium.



Conviction Currents


institutional hot sauce reckoning
grenadines hopscotch nettles
at the forefront rampaging sonata hats
akimbo or double-diced offware
pension for uplift seeking a madrigal key
marking acrostic memory stitches
pecked against a sidelong zeitgeist
ranchero deluxe its garnished fervor
embargo stuffing clatters the mildew
ointment assures a polish as dawn
encroaches the medium spittle mat
shattered oblong grating conundrum
after mast polish inures the dated
regimen its sought-for outburst
against an obsolescent totem urn
martial carts flip under bottle flays
a coarse admixture in mid-chorus
reclaims scattered mañana sculptors
ingenue ventricular rerun habits
a coastal lingerie in galley pursuit
bending caribou nostrums to force
the hitching trine to angular caster
a reflection’s eye turned fixture din
tying felt to limbo swizzle tricksters
guiding the putt-line shift hiding 
mantra shifts against the wind