Ganymede Within the VivariumMy image of a man’s hand in the form of a fox reaches its apsis in relation to Ganymede as its station in the wetlands dissolves. My own hand performs as the phantom of negation. A fox twitches and the western edge of an aspen grove opens to show its translucent soul. Sparks cast by an axe blade catch the blue grasses. Its formlessness prevents an auroral inferno. There’s nothing mysterious about the vibratory mewl of the stray cat. Fragments of pottery abandoned to the kiln become clouds drifting through forgotten atmospheres of the seventeenth century. A man’s hand fingers the moon as it rests, wedged among the rings of Saturn. Its brain starves with pleasure. As ozone molecules decrease, the foreign magnetosphere grows, inverting over a span of centuries. A marmot’s bark signals to its tribe: the day is rising, its narrow throat opening to the dawn’s constellation. The Smoldering CenserI was a peanut vendor along the roadside I surveyed the coast from a fiberglass carafe I named a grassy crest for the scent of cinnamon I turned blue as a thread in the heartless dusk I forgot the way water flows along a cracked riverbed I went home to forge a censer from twigs and clay I sniffed at wisps of myrrh as if adrift in paradise I refused to eat the limp produce of a ruined farm I embraced the inevitable tragedy as an oil spill tore apart the clumps of my matted hair I wed the strangling fig tree and lived as a forgotten child A Rubicon of MirrorsMy I was never eulogized. My I ensconced every pyramid and confessed to an empty pitcher of perversions. My I lampooned its own pneuma. My I shaved the incisors of migrant workers and gnawed off their landlords’ topography. In the incinerator of the spirit, my I throbbed recklessly, its daily radiation spilling from each orifice. It endured a sea of figs. My I entered the bullet hole. My I made itself from clay. It looked only towards the orchard. It lengthened the equation spelled out along a canvas’s edge. A brace of lizards wintered inside the ragged circle of my I. They made silver slices of apple. My I fondled the notes trilling from the fretless neck of a violin. It wavered among the blanked-out faces that lined a receding sky. My I will marry its own photograph. My I will remain in front of a white wall of fog, making forms from the curves of candles, crossing a Rubicon of mirrors. Agricultural Landscape with CigaretteThey are counting money in the fallow fields. The mud comes up to their knees. The angry kids are lighting men’s beards on fire and the smoke makes my head ache. Women have gone down to hell and returned with severed doll heads piled up in the rusted-out tires of caravans. Dogs rush in as the dead man rises, again, from his shallow grave. Tonight, his family will capture him and return him home. He will trudge into the sea, having a final smoke. Clouds pile up behind the jagged mountains, fluffy and pale as golden mashed potatoes. And in the background, corn has existed. Beans, peanuts, the hundred-year-old teeth in the plastic gums of a child’s doll have existed. At least, these images appear on my several screens. At least, these images fill my home, exploding into the space held for cookbooks, sentimental trinkets, crucifixes, and the pages floating down from the holiest manuscript. In the Vanishing Halls of SplendorIn ancient times, in the lap of a fuming archangel, I lay dormant. I lapped confit from gratuitous gaps between the giant’s teeth. I communed with a witch among lice-infested hairfields. In the arms of the winter solstice, I began my march to the moon. I nestled within the mouth of a Napoleonic grenadier. With my rotting hands, I held his ceremonial rifle. I skewered my fatalistic neighbor with the tine of a burning fork. Floating in the salt-blued sea, I aped the sprawl of an apple tree. Arm in arm with spiders, I hunted the flitting gnats who carried away my wife. I combed through dreambooks to find lingering traces of winnowed wheat. In the arms of the winter solstice, I undressed against a backdrop of torches. Looking up from the quagmire, I admired the underside of a lapsed priest’s cassock. Notes for a Reflective DocumentaryInterchangeable actors cast shadows on silkscreen, waiting for cellulose to immortalize their calculated risks. Mimicking an orator’s habit won’t drive any assumptions out from your skull, but it might force new life into exhausted parables. For example, an onscreen butterfly passes through blades of grass without its wings dimming in the sun’s insistent light. Consider this a formula for a script: imitate the flow of a child’s hand as you pose each segment as a reproduction of an evergreen’s drive to double itself. Realist screenplays and film reels form the limits of expression. Syllables crammed into a monologue form the ligaments of deception. The difference is evident from the cluttered top of a real tree, where perspective points converge and a horizon dawns. Connor Fisher is the author of The Isotope of I (Schism Press, 2021) and four poetry and hybrid chapbooks including Speculative Geography (Greying Ghost Press, 2022). 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 has appeared in journals including Denver Quarterly, Random Sample Review, Tammy, Tiger Moth Review, and Clade Song. He currently lives and teaches in northern Mississippi.
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