A Mountain of Grass

1.

I am not transcribing the sunset because the colors do not replicate. With every pause I miss certain words. In my next dream, I will apologize to the landscape. Thin reeds form an ecology under winter’s bell jar. My wrists bared the inverted image of a nautilus bone. Mornings extend an invitation to climb a mountain of grass. Seed clusters line up along a wheel’s edge. A dictionary rests at the top.

2.

We placed padlocks on wheat fields and slept until spring. A monogram of sounds overflowed the edges of the map. My daughter explodes. Highways mark the evolving order of the endless now. Oak trees double the horizon as the assemblage falters. My cloaked economy collapsed. A papercut graced my instep. The old gods sizzle.

3.

Concave lettering marks the sprawling belly of a trellis. Fog settles in, masking the abandoned sea of winter blossoms. Fog settles in, culling ships from the gulfs of unmapped flotsam. Remnants of negative space saturate the incoming tide of lights.

4.

Photographs of the phenomenon slivered themselves into confetti. I was marooned with no anchor. I stood before St. Mark’s Cathedral. Larks had become extinct. Newly formed ice caves objectified the smudged eyes of nascent larvae. They are ghosts setting out into unknown prose beyond the ritual margin.

Another Broken-Off Sky

At night I dreamed a fountain of hammers.

This way, I could hold my body

inside the phantom piano. I became cargo. I learned

to translate bellows in the thorax of a whale.

I lost the light. It

abandoned me to ambient futures. I lived

on the only planet. By day I would document the

moods of my consumerist shrine. I inhabited a flooded

shopping mall and unsentenced the language

of global capital.

The clock is unfamiliar. Its face

dissolves. It drips thick over

an infernal moon the size of a puddle.

Singular Ecology

Agriculture does not relent. There is no capital outside its bulbous phenomena trench. There is no perfume. Not rivers. It sits beneath my tongue. There are no ancestors. Nor ephemerally rotating crops. Agronomy forms a rust collage. There is no cemetery. Crops resurrect their own clone. There are no strangers. No purposeless ancillary corpses.




Rabbit Valley

This road has a private language that it keeps from me.

I never touch the road but I feel its swells.

It forms a vectored line across my Georgia

the kind a horse could infinitely follow.

A planet turns over in the back of my throat.

The planet forms a congress made and made of milkweed.

From a distance you could only see the jumble.

Oh I would trade it for a chance to breathe

the sweet air from Rabbit Valley

above the shadows cast by my narrow legs.

Here rests the horse you rode in on

panting with the mouth of a boy below its broken crown.

Here the reins steam as hot as blood.

They steam impossibly under bulbous alder branches.

What I see is almost the real scene broken

down into a confounded geography

an incidental litany of the ungoverned.

My Final Son

I drank gin and twisted valves to bleed my brain, to fill my belly with fiber.

Blue appleskin in my son’s mouth.

A Holy Spirit covering its breasts with fingertips.

In acoustic Rocky Mountains, poet-bodies became snow crevasses.

And they photographed my body as a channel for fiber.

I ate only seeds dropped by a mechanical she-mouse.

In the rift, in the spread-wide blossom where I dozed.

Little girls picked flowers and made atomic glitter.

I mean every hydrogen petal beckoned to me.

I became the father of pacified goats.

Little boys chanted a festival resonance.

Ponies excavated the crevasses I live in, where my poet-body stays.

Where I fed my son the blue appleskin.

Where he picked flowers like eyelashes from the foreheads of deer.

My blue son, my heart caught in a snare!

Only you with your dainty shoes can balm my red eyes.

Fibrous blood-belly, I abandon you on the page.

And hydrogen glitter showered in the soft palm of a druid’s child.

On northern glaciers, in an Alaska frothed by salt-pillars.






══════════════════
Connor Fisher is the author of the chapbooks The Hinge (Epigraph Magazine, 2018) and Speculative Geography (Greying Ghost Press, 2021). He has an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a PhD 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.

*Image credit: Sofia Borges, ‘Theatre, or Cave’, 2014.