#4 Home Videos - Allie Frazier

There are things that happen that completely change your life, your soul, your future in one instant. I lost my mother to ovarian cancer when I was four years old, and in that instant, everything changed. (Years later, I gained an incredible step-mom who raised me-- poem/story  on her to follow shortly...) Anyway, I've been grappling with the emotional scars of her passing and how it's affected me my entire life. This is a poem I wrote trying to process what it must have been like for her to realize her daughters would never truly know her except through stories, photos, and home videos she left behind. She was a brave and beautiful woman.


Home Videos
Allie Frazier

My mother is stored
in the box downstairs,
our short life together
saved in two-hour intervals.
Everything I’ve learned of her

(her single dimple, her wavy brown hair,
   her crooked smile
which I wear like fingerprints)
retained in the time it takes to
fast forward or
rewind a tape.
She’s preserved in the movie reels,
patiently waiting for me to

press play,
wanting me to meet her,
to learn how my name
sounded on her lips before the

Cancer broke

her voice.
To see how my sleep-heavy
four-year-old frame
fit into her chest before the

sickness broke

her strength.
My mother,
neatly packaged,
labeled, downstairs,
was hoping
I’d remember these tapes and
I’d forget my last memories
of the hospital room –
   the paleness,
   the frailness,
   the staleness of it all,
and
I’d erase the moment she realized
she could be no more than a

Stranger
leaving the faintest scent of a mother
I would have to track
and discover
on
my
own.

-2008

#3 Once - Allie Frazier

Once
Allie Frazier

Once,

when all were drunk,
splewing down the
crooked stairs,
you softly touched
my face
and I

remembered.

- 2009

#2 Christmas in Tennessee - Allie Frazier

My grandfather was a WWII vet, war hero, and small-town farmer. He was a sweet, sweet man, but raised to be very stoic, quiet, and a little distant. He struggled through many sicknesses and health issues towards the end of his life and felt that his death was just around the corner... for years.

Christmas in Tennessee 

Allie Frazier

He lives in arthritic fear,
his bones
dry and brittle,
his veins
weak and swollen yet
his doctor gives him at least ten more years.

He dreads the holidays—
his lively granddaughters reminding him of an easier life
when he could still walk up stairs two at a time
or listen to sermons without a hearing aid
or sweat the Mexican spices in white chicken chili.

But now, this new century has left
A funny taste in his mouth.
He rolls it around his tongue as he sits
uncomfortably in the corner and dreams
of his looming death.
In a world of his own,
he stiffly watches
the warm-blooded bodies
moving their muted lips
and breathing easy on the couch.

My grandpa,
suspicious of death,
squeezing my hand,
saying goodbye for the
last time

three Christmas’s in a row.

- 2008

#1: What are Years? Marianne Moore

I thought I should start this blog out with my #1, absolute favorite poem. I can't tell you how many times I've read it. Moore writes that the only certain thing in this life is that we all will die (bleak, I know...), but that in knowing and accepting this, we should rally against our death and failures and instead live fully and completely in joy.

What are years?

by Marianne Moore

What is our innocence,

what is our guilt? All are

naked, none is safe. And whence

is courage: the unanswered question,

the resolute doubt, -

dumbly calling, deafly listening-that

in misfortune, even death,

encourage others

and in it's defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He 

sees deep and is glad, who

accedes to mortality

and in his imprisonment rises

upon himself as 

the sea in a chasm, struggling to be

free and unable to be,

in its surrendering

finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,

behaves. The very bird,

grown taller as he sings, steels

his form straight up. Though he is captive,

his mighty singing

says, satisfaction is a lowly

thing, how pure a thing is joy.

This is mortality,

this is eternity.

The Preface

Well, here we are again. You have been one of the most stable things in my life, and I have plenty of cheesy poems written in ABAB rhyming schemes to prove it. A mousey-haired, gap-toothed 8-year-old framed you as Christmas gifts to her siblings and mother. An awkward middle schooler read you during her bubble baths and wrote silly poems to boys. A 9th grader joined the forensics team to recite you at competitions in front of balding, pudged men. She stayed after school to curate you as the Poetry Editor of her high school's arts mag. She was published in national teen poetry magazines. You drove her to tears. She studied and dissected you in college, compiled her favorite poets, hoarded her favorite poems, created art projects that revolved around you, dove deep into you then, but for some reason, stopped writing. What for?

----------

On the inside flap of a poetry book gifted to me for graduation, my creative writing teacher wrote: "One day, I'll be reading collections written by you." It taunts me to this day.

----------

I once compiled a book of 200 of my favorite poems for someone I loved deeply. I spent days and weeks pouring myself into that gift. Now I wish I had printed two copies, as both he and the book are gone.

--------

This blog serves two purposes. First, as a covenant between my old self and my new self-- A promise to revive the poet that has laid dusty and dormant in my soul for years now. A call-to-arms to take up the pen (....or blinking cursor?) and write again. To force myself through the struggle again.

Secondly, this blog replaces that book I lost, so I will always have the poems I love available to me at all times. I'll post poems that have touched and inspired me over the years (if I can figure out the copyrite details...), as well as my own work (old and (hopefully) new!)

This is the study, love story, and retrospective of myself by me. You're welcome to follow along.

Always,
Allie