Connor Fisher
The Word Boon
The animal is missing. Its tiny wings flaunt electrodes. Its eyelids crystalize from a vibrating thorax. The oasis accumulates bones as quail dissolve in drips of florescent albumen. Encyclopedias electrify distance to the inverted side of the neon moon. An echidna ruffles thoroughbred entrails. If the antler emerges, if the antenna inverts, the eclectic harvest will flagellate kings.
Here is the primitive frequency, secreted away in the perigee of a black orbit. The apsis quavers. The split lip spills its honey-seed. Minus the spent follicles, the ox tongues, the egret’s bill hisses to the sod. That and a thousand scarabs trespass inside the python’s glowing skull.
The Hare Child
A night is coming. The night of nights. Large, rotten fruit ferment to the core and fall, vital polyps, fall onto clawing moss. My rabbit is final; it will drag the mountains apart. It will tug and tug, pulling back provincial filaments to reveal swollen oil bladders.
In the cave, you nose through a century of rubble. The last horse, the one you rode until its nostrils withered, has slowly come apart. Its flesh and bones ornament the quicksand floor. A sparrow nestled in its throat; its needles tickle as it laps and laps at phlegm. The seal shape drags the skin.
Out there, in the intestine of a forgotten holt, a hare child births. The hare child slouches. It smears a bloody drop along its monstrous lip. As if an agnostic clone, it resembles a doll, from its stringy cascade of hair to the cruel hunch in its back. The hare child swallows milk like a glutton; it has already begun to swell.
Above, the hidden clouds bleed. They pulse and bloat with sickening rain. A deer gallops away after purging its entrails, its bowels and heart, its thickest membranes, every tissue, every inch of hollow fabric in its lungs. The leftover husk rattles.
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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, Colorado Review, Tammy, Posit, Cloud Rodeo, and Denver Quarterly.