Frankie Reed blurs history, divinity, and the body to uncover sweetness in the places we least expect it.
There’s a certain charge that runs through Frankie Reed’s work—an electricity that comes from holding history, divinity, and the strange machinery of the human body in the same quiet breath. A Liverpool-born poet and visual artist, Frankie moves easily between mediums, stitching together symbolism, emotion, and physicality with an instinct that feels both scholarly and instinctively visceral. Their background in the arts and historical research feeds this impulse; nothing is ever just an object, a moment, or a memory. Everything, in Frankie’s hands, becomes part of a wider constellation of meaning.
As co-editor of Flesh and Parchment, a zine dedicated to the strange, the sacred, and the bodily, Frankie’s creative world is rich with the uncanny. They contribute both poetry and original artwork, a pairing that speaks to their belief that text and image can – and should – meet in the same charged space. Their writing has appeared in Blood Orange and Tongue of Stone, and they’ve taken their work to stages across the city, where their performances blend quiet intensity with a deep sense of curiosity about the macabre, the historical, and the beautiful.
The poem introduced here grows directly from the tension Frankie lives with daily: a body shaped by chronic back pain, a structure that refuses ease yet still offers unexpected pockets of beauty. Rather than viewing pain as a closed door, Frankie reimagines it as a landscape—an orchard turned inward, ribs arching like boughs, the spine unfurling as a root system. Human and natural forms blur until the reader is invited into something intimate and strangely lush.
“Peel me open,” the poem seems to say—not as a gesture of surrender, but as an act of resilience. Within decay, within difficulty, sweetness still forms. What Frankie offers is an invitation to witness the body not just as suffering, but as a place where transformation, strangeness, and unexpected beauty continue to take root.
The Orchard Beneath My Skin
A grove grows inward, not outward—
each rib a bent bough straining with fruit that ripens in silence.
Under the flesh, a wasp nest of nerves
thrums, swollen with the sugar of memory.
I dreamed last night of teeth in my lungs,
molars mossy with lichen and wet breath.
My breath:
a stream clogged with copper leaves,
its banks slick with old prayers and salt.
My spine is a root system torn from the soil,
dangling, confused—still twitching.
It seeks earth even in air,
craves the dark firmness of rot
over the sterile hush of light.
Veins thread like ivy through the rooms of me,
green with want,
choking the beams,
sprouting mouths from elbow crooks,
soft red mouths that mumble
what I dare not voice.
There is bark where my back should be,
and it splits in winter—
cold makes everything honest.
Through the cracks, you can glimpse
something tender,
still pulsing,
not quite human.
So come.
Peel me open.
Bite the peach that bleeds
and tell me what it tastes like:
truth, or sap,
or the end of something
we once called
“self.”
