Joanna C. Valente
Below are three illustrations (with one above as well) created by our editor Joanna C. Valente for Fox Henry Frazier’s forthcoming book, Raven King (out from Yes Poetry in November 2021). You can preorder the book bundle here (which includes music, the book, and more).
Joanna C. Valente
Joanna C. Valente
Joanna C. Valente
The Fox-Haired Seer Makes A Pilgrimage to Devil’s Elbow, NY, Where in 1932 A Steam-Shovel Operator Discovered the Skull of an Axe-Murdered Young Woman; and Listens
Not unlike the Vestals in their forced
walks across Rome to prove their bodies
unviolated by men, I conduct my promenade
these nights: my body both water and sieve,
both returned to the earth and ignited
by rage. I pause, lift my skirt to avoid
stepping on it, extend my hand to passing cars. The luckiest
among them will keep driving. Those less fortunate
will deliver me, hot tongue spreading
to all-consuming inferno, the offering of their
human hearts still beating, skulls spiderwebbed
apart by force of impact. Smiling, I’ll thumb
their eyes shut as they rest like unborn
calves against the steering wheel: milky, still.
A precious few will stop for me in rain, open
the door as though to a carriage, their exposed
hearts pure as a distilled spirit, as violent white powder.
I can’t take them. They’ll blink & find my voice
was merely certain tones of wind, curves and visage
a mistake in the brain—hallucinatory
patterns made by wind in a blizzard, or their own
rich somnambulant vision. They’ll scurry
home to their dark houses, light a room, wrap themselves
in blankets, and dream of a paper doll transforming
into smoke, set alight by a brutal boy after he’d made her
scraps with his blade. My last moments illuminate like Leda’s
smothered convulsions against downy breast
and the cleaved immortality that comes
After. And so I take you, beloved, the men used
to say to the young girls they chose to serve Vesta.
Sometimes, I change my clothes, as bored
girls are wont to do: sequins and tulle, late for prom; car
trouble in a taffeta ball gown; or wandering in my own
true Victorian garb, corseted, each breath controlled, abject
in all but my appetites. I stare
into myself—this fury I ignite, what
gift to my daughters who walk
home alone at night: gibbous
reds and yellows eradicating
each other within let tongues
consume the lamb
flickering ravenous silent
save the sporadic, inveterate
ferocious susserate I am
Fox Henry Frazier is a poet and essayist whose first book, The Hydromantic Histories, was selected by Vermont Poet Laureate Chard deNiord as recipient of the 2014 Bright Hill Poetry Award. Her second, Like Ash in the Air After Something Has Burned (2017), was nominated for an Elgin Award. She edited the anthologies Among Margins: Critical and Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics and Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity.
Fox was graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Binghamton University, and was honored with fellowships at Columbia University, where she received her MFA. She was Provost’s Fellow at the University of Southern California, where she earned a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing, and served as Poetry Editor of Gold Line Press and a Founding & Managing Editor of Ricochet Editions.
Fox created the small literary press Agape Editions, which she currently manages with the poet Jasmine An. She lives in upstate New York with her daughter, her dogs, her gardens, and her ghosts.
