Weeping the Tropical Moonlight Because Nobody’s Told Her by Fox Henry Frazier
Yes Poetry, 2022
What happens when a woman changes to accommodate closeness to a beloved? And can she ever fully return to who she was before she made that sacrifice? Coming on the heels of her last collection, Raven King, with this new book, Frazier stays in the realm of the magical, using her rich language and imagination, as well as full color paintings to explore a more singular loss. Here the protagonist gives up her true form of siren to become a betta fish when she succumbs to the song of a beloved, an irony that cannot escape the reader. The very thing that gives a siren power is song, and here it is also the source of her undoing. At first she doesn’t doubt her power to charm, but she soon realizes that this may not be the case.
The plan had always been to shift
back into siren
(or even human, for you)
but now, stuck in this bowl, I was just a stupid fish—
surely you had plucked me from the water
by chance, I could have been any fish—unworthy of more
than a few scattered flakes, timed by your watch.
The speaker revels in the beloved, and, in intimate and perfect detail (the hands, the lines around the eyes), describes the flaws (“like a bombed out Belfast circa ‘84”) and the beauty (“golden orchids spread themselves under your hands”) that keep her enchanted. The speaker seems to realize the one-sided nature of this relationship, describing the confines of her bowl as “water and crystal like an anchorite’s veil,” comparing her situation to the isolated devotion of this religious figure. In the end, she is dismissed by the beloved and returned to the water, her original home.
Despite this inattention, the siren still longs for the beloved and questions if the feelings were ever real, why she was chosen at all. Was it pity? Pure physical attraction? She still wonders why “all the ways I wanted to love you were wrong.” She tries to weave her water magic into the beloved, to use the dismissal as occasion to help alleviate the damage both in the beloved and the self, but even a healer can see that the siren is better off without a partner that curdles and distorts each gift, that she needs to drown his human song before she can truly be free.
In this fever dream of a collection, Frazier uses her gifts for language, syntax, and music to bring new layers to feelings universal to anyone who has ever doubted themselves after losing someone they thought was special. This is a vulnerable collection, exposing a wounded heart that is learning to regain its power and relearning that the self is the most difficult damage to heal.
Donna Vorreyer is the author of To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016), and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Donna’s art and photography are featured or forthcoming in North American Review, Waxwing, Pithead Chapel, Thimble Literary Magazine, Penn Review, The Boiler and other journals. She lives in the Chicago suburbs where she hosts the monthly online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.