The Intruder

At night I’m sure someone’s there, moving
in the dark. I leave our bed, grope
my way to the door, hope my fingers will find
the copper knob instead of a stranger’s hand.

I never know what chair or table or lamp
will touch me back with flesh. The living bone
of our intruder seems to find us open,
exposed to any pain the dark might choose.

I always assume the visit brings us harm.
We can be broken and entered so easily.
But it might have begun before I noticed,
started back in daylight, or here in me

staring at you as I stand beside our bed:
an intruder breathing softly in the dark.




Cosmonauts

When I was nine and a well-behaved girl
despite the time I slapped my little sister
for playing with my favorite paintbrushes,
I climbed the trees at night with my friend Tanya.
We floated out to space on the high limbs,
the branches twisting up among the stars.

Valentina, we were your disciples.
The first woman in space, a legend before
we were born, you orbited the earth for us
as if you’d never left the nighttime sky.
Tanya said the stars would always remember
anyone who traveled toward their light.

“I want to be the coldest girl in the world,”
Tanya told me. “Cold and hard.” She flexed
her arm for me to feel, then threw a pebble
at a truck that passed beside our tree.
So we agreed: the two of us would refuse
to cry at movies or sigh over kittens.

We started painting people while they slept.
We would dab my mother’s nose with purple
or brush a mustache on Tanya’s snoring father.
Our victims, awake, would yell or give us spankings,
and we would giggle, light our cigarettes,
and stub them out against each other’s palms.

When I was ten Tanya moved to Moscow.
I climbed the trees sometimes and looked for her,
high above the highest branches. In space,
the emptiness as cold as we had hoped,
a chill I loved because I feared my warmth,
the stars still recalled the shape of her face.

KEVIN FRAZIER works for the European Union.  He is one of the leaders of Media Barents, a joint Russian-EU project to develop the film and television industry in the Barents region, including Murmansk and Arkhangelsk.  He has also worked for the Russian State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. His poems and stories have appeared in TriQuarterly and Poetry Review, among other places.  Click here to read more of Kevin Frazier's poetry.

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