John Frazier   COME TO HARM You're going to suffer one day, I tell my students. They are not innocent. Just young. And trusting still. It sounds like a veiled threat though I don't intend. As I say this I'm thinking of the toddler yesterday whose forehead was split a good two, three inches above his right eyebrow. I retrieved his tennis ball when it rolled into a city street--so he wouldn't come to harm. But it happened anyway. Minutes before he was sad about the ball, then pleased to have it back. Then a trail of blood. I didn't tell my students about the one who had left. And now is back, though it's too late. Or that I didn't hear from Dad after that winter in New York. That what I'm afraid will happen. Will.   AGAIN, WITHOUT You spoke of famine. How to compare food to love? Or the other way. If there's no famine but just knowledge of evil, how girls in Bangladesh receive less food than boys over time. You said life was terror getting through. Then the smell of your hair. Even across the table, the soft obliterating odor. Indulgent to think of my own needs first. But that is what men do, I said, not to anyone. Then those lines again, after this time apart. Anyone else may leave you. I will never leave you. How do I tell you these things? That last July we drove over a thousand miles through California into the Baja because we were at our end.   INDUSTRY All day at some task or another. Not out of need-- searching the crevices of bathroom tile for grime, organizing old books in the attic--or want, even--tending a dying orchid. A machine even as a boy so as to control. My lover says it breaks his heart imaging my arm akimbo, a broom cradled in the fold, resting because it was hard work, once the vacuum had broken, sweeping the carpet--dog's hair my mom would scowl-- each evening after school. I was always what women called busy. Now: diligent, conscientious, productive. Later, but when I was still young, I'd taken a boy into my plans for the summer. Someone had given us a home at the beach and had left whiskey. Why did I ever want to leave him mornings over coffee to begin our chores. Or from the bed each evening after lovemaking? But it was not always so. Even now I remember nights Tucker and I would swim in the Atlantic, phosphorescent algae lighting our naked bodies like tiny anchors. Ruth Bolduan Trojan Horse oil & gold acrylic, 48" x 36", (1994) more work by Ruth Bolduan     ALDEBARA Like skin. The tree's surface exposed, trunks spreading like legs--mine, yours, a child's. Yes, even an innocent's. We watched as wind blew for hours, the cracked red leaves pulling away in a stream. This was the cleaving I spoke of--the tree shocked and parted losing all it had and still not done, flecks of persistent red fluttering with the wind. Like my sadness I wanted to explain. Still even like the red rush. Like the poet's brother. The one who always believed he'd die young, then thought he wouldn't, then knew he would. What use, again, is this grief? At night you turning from me is the hardest to let go.   ONCE I've never seen someone shit, I say to my boyfriend as he begins to close the bathroom door with his right index finger, already lowering himself on the toilet. I want to be asked to witness the white briefs bunch at his ankles, the hairy legs spread, his face turn in a grimace. But you've lived with men, he replies. I don't want to be vulgar, I say, eyeing his balls, waiting for an invitation. Even as I defend my ignorance--how I grew up in a house of prudish women, how the impossible boys I dated never showed me this--I know it's not true. I saw my father squat once over the porcelain toilet in the old house the summer it burned, the muscles in his thighs tensing. Why does everything come back to this man, I think, even at this age? And now hours later while doing the dishes I've been thinking this is what I will do, love the worst parts of the men who come home to me.     John Frazier has published poetry in many venues, most recently The Beacon's Best of 2001: Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures, which includes work by Lucille Clifton, Cornelius Eady and Li-Young Lee. Frazier has also published work in The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, and Presence Africaine. Many of these featured poems come from a manuscript of sonnets and sonnet derivations called Aldebara. Frazier recently completed Subaltern, a book on hierarchy and touch. Published in Volume 4, Number 1, Winter 2003.