4 poems || Vernon Frazer

Sacrificial Lam



Ambient glucose dexterity:
fingers shuffle backward,
boards imperil their lunch

at residue buckets.
Tempers linger, clinging
close to remnants

where low waters shield
template virgins from altar masks.
Converging word forests

fossil predicates, predate
subjects with glottal chaperones
marking esplanade surges

across catacomb buckets.
Where altars loom, the waters
flume pillar statements

instead of geyser briefs
riding stretchers. Hiding breaches
the consensus rite. Before

the knife can steal the body
follows its urge to displace
the tiding mirror of ritual moon





Lowered Elevation



Sulfur ledge,
unspoken legends
presume

carfare addiction. Stigmata

carted before the horse
resumes the measure lost
as status

a scent
rising from the furrow.

A broken adagio sunset
declaims the inert folly:
uprising

pledged to cloud
its treasured obfuscation
under lamps

allowed the forfeit measure

to play
a crowded history lift.
Against

the lurch
a brazen face turned trying



Night Watch



pontoon glyphs

the satellite moon recharges
to bellicose marginal dawn

a sea 
setting surface 
on a lift 
varicose as the vein of form 

itself

tied against its blue largesse
though crater magnet anecdotes

turned 
magenta in the telling




Snaking Through Old Grass



Cattle honoraria never hover 
over the lowing balance near the shed 
where the active flow plays dinner 

as a tumid hunch. Limerick replicas 
badger rumors chanting memoirs 
of afternoon shade where tonsils bloom. 

The rattle in the grass remembers 
the various residue briefings. A clearly 
unpleasant stranger throws serpentine 

shakers against its makers. Battling 
solitary disruption, their excess fangs 
a memory of its own: lovers that renew
 
the lather of their faded resemblance 
through whatever shred recovers the glowing
ballast, dead except to those

too slow to hear the speed going past