3 Poems

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The Good Sacrament 

I dabbed my tongue-tip against the red carpet’s Berber pile. I tripped down the wrong instance. My equine elbows inverted and formed a tonal comma splice. The president imploded along the architecture of his simplified spine. He moldered between the spiteful implants of puppet collages. 

The word machine churned out seamless floor. Its cloned soot maimed the windows. I tasted a sodium swell that threatened to erase the gulf. I held my lizard’s skin and felt the wires within its captive corner twitch. 

Together we anointed the sick. We administered holy myron to the sleeping boy’s blistered forehead. His steeple fingers shaped a perfect circuit. His split brain spread a mirage over the lost acre of fungus. The child’s closet evolved; it hatched tendrils until its latent exoskeleton floated. 

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A Holocaust of Confluent Mouths



Now I have brooded through a dozen mechanical hamlets. Now I have lost my musculature down sputtering holes under the riverbed willows. In the watermill my feeders suckle and throb. At the brink of my private cataclysm, they will sink to the zone of blackened shells. They will surrender to mammalian eggs tucked away in silt.

In the delta, a rancid wind dribbles its drooping pellets onto the submerged plain. Thin clams, clattering in vinegar, cling to the banks’ unstable surface. They are tongues. They finger spent valves beneath the floating I. Just on the bitter surface, my breast rises like the silhouette of a frozen horse. It resides there in terror.

I have been dehydrated. My corpse retained no fluids to steam in the imminent inferno. A horse made of brittle black hair rolls in the tattered dust. Its juices boil and foam. The glass animals, evocative and acoustic, are shaped like a breath. They rest, fetal, on heavy metals that leech up through tightening voltage fields into their fragile membrane. 

The soft fabrics of my middle ear flail in dark matter. Sounds are an abomination; a trash heap of hunger enters and leaves this ambient self. I float at the edge of an exhausted continent. The ocean veins pump through the night; they clench and squirm away from the depths’ menacing shadows. And there, in the lowest strata, mineral fissures burst open revealing the great bedrock cathedral.

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The Book of Fiefs 

My dynasty was fading. My approaching regicide usurped any sense of decorum. My specter disintegrated into the blotted-out inverse of its image. I slept through the stings of the dagger; like a bland djinn I floated inward through my own teeth. 

I lassoed my baroque clone to absorb his corpse. My last qualm nested under a cotton tarp. Oil spurts from the igneous rift; a latitude of hands calms my contoured veins, so recently propped with crowns of eggshell. 

Remember the waves blazoned on every page. Remember the crushed arches that enveloped huddled mutts. The way royal jelly stimulates the flawless reflex of screech owls as they survey fallow deer gnawing blindly through the Kingswood. 

Tomorrow I will rest in a holiday of time. I will leap at the gorge and emerge as a stain on the moon’s limpid eye. In chartered yew forests, in the inferno-huts of rotting aristocrats, in the leaking udders of swollen mother cows, the nightingale of poetry swabs the anointing oil onto its private mosque. 

Like a weightless corpse, my feudal economy will invert and collapse into itself. Without buttresses it will sleep and wince, sleep and wince. 

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Connor Fisher is the author of the chapbooks The Hinge (Epigraph Magazine, 2018) and Speculative Geography (Greying Ghost Press, forthcoming 2021). He has an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English from the University of Georgia. His poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Typo, the Colorado Review, Tammy, Posit, Cloud Rodeo, and the Denver Quarterly.

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