TILIKUM

by Bayleigh Fraser

I’m sorry, I thought you smiled at me
when your mouth caved open for fish,

teeth gleaming hooks, I thought you splashed
my body because you saw parched lips

with pearly onyx eyes, that you understood
how I, riddled with Florida sun, could not have

what you did, cold, water which was endless
to my child self idolizing the girls in wetsuits

and ponytails riding your back, you looking
blanket soft beneath their hands. I thought

that was love. Maybe it was. I’m sorry
I loved a man who made me feel captive,

like a second skin, who wanted my hands,
my messy apartment, me gaunt-faced, his music

tortured from the television speakers, but then,
I was stroking his silky hair and having his baby,

coming back to him, and you were thrashing
for a way out. I’m sorry for returning to your spectacle.

That you sliced open the pool and bent
into the sun. That your body barrelled with gravity.

The last time I watched you—you still shiny
as a strip of old film, a fresh spill—I fought

with my sister. Blaming the heat, how
it buoyed our tempers. The two of us

huddled in the back of stadium bleachers,
our one handheld fan like a wish we couldn’t decide on.

I’m sorry we forgot your pain. One sweat-baked face
shoving another for the slightest draft, hands and curse words

scraping for a chance to hold the new video camera.
We were stormy voices. Confined bodies.

A breath away from the other’s throat, what no one
could have mistaken for love, but was all we knew.

Bayleigh Fraser is an American poet currently residing and writing in Canada, where she hopes to continue her education in poetry. She previously studied at Stetson University in Deland, Florida. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 3Elements Review, A Bad Penny Review, The Brooklyn Quarterly, One, Qu, Rattle, and other publications.

I WANT TO WRITE A POEM FOR PARIS

by Bayleigh Fraser

A memorial at La Belle Equipe restaurant, one of the sites of the attacks in Paris on Friday night. Credit Lionel Bonaventure/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images via NY Times, November 14, 2015

But I don’t want to hear its ragged shots
of reason, the uncertain billowing of its curtain.

No explaining an ocean rippling cracked glass,
where faces have vanished under a sun

only desiring to burn, or reflect itself
in each thing it touches. There is no poem

rising from the soundless terror of hashtags:
asking for God’s ear, an illuminated tower

searches for satellites. Prayers. Paused players.
Foot approaching the bass pedal. Gunmetal.

I want to open sounds so I can understand them.
The words only thought in my head as I read them.

Like fireworks, someone says, and he was gone
and so was she, falling into their own echoes.

And what can I say, showing up in the distance,
with only tremors in my hands, still warm with breath?


Bayleigh Fraser is an American poet currently residing and writing in Canada. She attended Stetson University in Deland, Florida and plans to continue her education in Canada. Her poems have appeared in A Bad Penny Review, Artemis Journal, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Hart House Review, The Lake, One, Rattle and other publications.