Published by Associate Editor on May 12, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

Your Dark Angel

by Robert Frazier

Your dark angel swims in blue lightning
Through the ice fields of your dream

Kisses heat waves into your slack lips
And brings sight to your blind core

She whispers sin from every speaker
A suggestion you can almost hear

Speaks jihad from the wasteland
Of numberless television news clips

She screams fire from the air raid sirens
In a whitewash of static hiss

She watches you from the sky drones
Maps your course through the day

Peeks at you through all lenses
Mimics your moves like a shadow

She blinks from the LED screens
With undecipherable error messages

She paints hidden directives
On the periphery of your vision

Your dark angel divines your probables
Unravels massive streams of binary

Parses your red truths
Unravels the never-has-been

Your dark angel knows you
Like no other will ever ever know you

BIO: Robert Frazier is the author of eight books of poetry, and a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award for poetry. He has won an Asimov’s Reader Award and has been on the final ballot for a Nebula Award for fiction. His books include Perception Barriers, The Daily Chernobyl, and Phantom Navigation (2012). His 2002 poem, “A Crash Course in Lemon Physics,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His long poem, “Wreck-Diving the Starship,” was a runner-up for a 2011 Rhysling Award. Recent works have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dreams & Nightmares, and Strange Horizons.

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Published by Associate Editor on May 12, 2014. This item is listed in Issue 22, Issue 22 Poetry, Poetry

Imageography

by Robert Frazier

There are the wild-hair ones
Ones with glasses, the pipe, the violin
Riding that bicycle (with cast shadow)
The posed hand to the chalkboard
And posed seated with hands clasped
The madcap tongue photo
On the beach (in trunks not hat)
The aged and worn math genius
The youthful man looking a bit like Poe
Or later in Bern like Sellers as Clouseau
With cousin/bride Elsa (in her hat)
The official 1921 Nobel portraits
Accepting a U.S. citizenship certificate
The ‘Dead at 76’ headline head shot
His brain stolen from the Smithsonian
But the telling image for me
Is Einstein standing in his study
Books askew on the shelves
The desk a mound of paperwork
His finger and thumb to his chin
Musing as if he’d misplaced a pen
In the chaos of text and symbol
Or lost a phrase of pure physics
Perhaps momentarily
Perhaps from a misconnection
In the all-fired synaptic unity
Of his complicated memory field
He seems most human then
Most at peace in a universe
He reimagined

(First published in Strange Horizons, 12/19/11)

BIO: Robert Frazier is the author of eight books of poetry, and a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award for poetry. He has won an Asimov’s Reader Award and has been on the final ballot for a Nebula Award for fiction. His books include Perception Barriers, The Daily Chernobyl, and Phantom Navigation (2012). His 2002 poem, “A Crash Course in Lemon Physics,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His long poem, “Wreck-Diving the Starship,” was a runner-up for a 2011 Rhysling Award. Recent works have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Dreams & Nightmares, and Strange Horizons.

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