The March Editor's Pick Poet is Teresa Frazee

Please feel free to email Teresa at: teresafrazee@yahoo.com

CAGED

Bare-armed outcasts, our long hair lay across our crinkled necks
Shadows coil round illustrations that burrow beneath the skin
My innovative hands swell, stinging in their idle restraint
We're truant trophies, caged like specimens mounted on a pin

In between pretense and compromise is where I dwell
I stretch for the next cramped foothold, stomping with rusty feet
In this theater of deception, I’m pre-condemned and sentenced
By a peerless jury before they have even taken a seat

Heedlessly punished under some code of mediocrity
A substitute for existence molds to a shapeless life
As the grated atmosphere strangles into resigned silence
An entourage of confusion still nurses the scars of strife

Collapsed the myths and rules, never fit into their pictured world
Some of us left the path of hallelujahs and empty amens
Long ago began to question what society has taught us
Now they monitor our behavior like animals within their pens

As they pass, guards sniff after my imaginative potency
With a pathetic pang, they crave what they can never obtain
Curious about what I imagine, more than is ordinarily seen
A stigmatic object of fear, left in this banal terrain

I’ve always held the key but here my life is more wisely spent
Committed no crime, I could not stand the strain of conformity
Brutalization of choice, forced disguise of gender, race or creed
Live in shades of underground, not in dimensions of hypocrisy 

Divided, yet unconquerable behind doors wrought in iron
Even with eyes shut, light exists, these bars no longer confine
But forgiveness will not enter this stagnant domain
They mistook me for someone with a kinder heart than mine

OFF THE GRID

In an infinite space not specified by the monitors of time, is where we live
Far away, off the grid, in an unrealized world, beyond mortal man’s optic lenses
Found our own Bohemia beneath the twisted inky shadows where Muses keep vigil
Encouragingly, they guide us from our restlessness and bring idle wits to their senses

Stimulating our imaginative spirit, weaving the passion of creation
With artistic concepts we had almost forgotten and lost to a waning memory
Through boundless stars of unexplored galaxies, sometimes you can hear us colonizing
Inspired legends who collectively transform our expressions into perfect harmony

Eternally we thrive between the collaboration of madness and the divine
Where Dante and Virgil walk along the edges of what appear to be Italian streams
Simultaneously, Dali tugs on his moustache like the string of the Maestro's violin
While I, the woman who conceived the idea of “The Creature” shall always write in my dreams

UNDER A BLAZING SUN

Under a blazing sun, opaque liquid crescents insatiably lick the salt-white asphalt
Spilt ripples slither and seep inside the fragmented ground, confirming their relentless reign
Flushing little venerable creatures with a smothering, transparent, drowning kiss
They slide into the wrinkled arms of the dreaded muddy pool where the watermarked remain

Entirely absorbed with exhausted breath, wriggling, they're left to their own defenses
Nuzzling against cold jagged gravel like brave mariners, they make cowards of us all
A chosen species swirling to their ultimate sacrifice along the bubbling edge
After a desperate struggle, fall prey to nature’s persistence which holds them in thrall

Vague floating eyes as if hand painted, refracted in the under-light, their view expands darkness
Retired in immersed beds, their final domain is the threshold of mortality
Their shadows fly away toward the articulate sky, mingling with a shrieking flurry of birds
Together they infiltrate miles of air, soaring into the silence of infinity

Teresa Ann Frazee has been a visual artist for over thirty years, with juried and international exhibitions that included solo shows in galleries, museums and other venues. She has received many awards and honors. Teresa has also been pursuing her other love, writing.

She has had her work exhibited in the following magazines and books: Literary House Review, Skyline Magazine, Poetry Shelter, The Horror Zine, Twice the Terror, The Horror Zine Anthology, Death Head Grin Magazine and Ebook Anthology, What Fears Become: The Horror Zine Anthology, Aphelion, My Word Wizard, Story Mania, The Original Van Gogh’s Ear, Black Petals and Blood Moon Rising. Teresa is the founder and host of the Boca Raton Museum of Art, Artists’ Guild Poetry reading Series: “Art & Literature,” and is the author of New City Souls Poetry Cabaret and the author of a Sebastian Kane performance.

Inside her world of make-believe, she paints and writes what she knows to be true. Bound by the creative force, she leaves reality entirely up to you.