6 poems
from Buckshot
Our Parish History
I pulled the invented thorns from my eyes. I dragged
out every flagellating spike and
opened myself as far as possible. I
cast off everything that was not mine.
I went to Santa Fe. There, I looked at art
from the outside. Always, always from the outside.
I hurled my glands onto the zealous cushion. I became
Baudelaire and neglected the fountain of puny signs.
My wife undressed me in a world of pine. She
glistened with snails, with stepped-on snails.
We lay at right angles and drank wine aged
in oyster husks. We burned off impossible crumbs.
The Basilica knew us. It wanted our perfect shells. It
opened a sacral door. We embroidered ourselves
with birds and graffiti; we unscrewed from the pale globe.
The Raptured Flesh
A crowd of people formed along the riverbed.
Their shared heart pumped velvet clots.
Out there, shaking nymphs clustered in their filthy cave.
They clustered in their perverse cave as its walls pulped
lumps of fat.
Now the rite could commence. The priest flicked his rotting tongues
across the sacrificial blood blade.
I had writhed long enough. I had writhed until my skin chafed and
broke in fractals of fascia. I had writhed and simpered
against the ropes. I was cocooned.
An evil star chartered above. Its mechanisms flaunted
infinitude.
The river moves through me as they light the deer fabric. Soon, too
soon, I will clamp the black bolts. I will charter, impossibly,
the resurrection of my vertebrae.
Warsaw
That night I was a cat; I licked cream from city
gutters. My sisters listened to the pulsing vartabed and
swabbed off the rainwater. Their ceiling of bees lowered;
it was a hallmark of ash. That echo. That echo,
inconclusive, haunting, joined to the black upright.
There was distant factory thunder and my observations grew
indiscrete. Red cardinals slunk underfoot. October will be warmer.
Sounds flirt. They percolate. Long landscapes
of anxiety make their mark on highways; tractor tracks mingle with
black grain-sloughs; train rails are sturgeons of the Great Plains. Now
I’ve exhausted the last of the images. Now I am high
in the mountains. It’s quiet. The eerie pika squeals. Marmots end their vision.
I lay my head on the dictionary. It purrs. It heals me.
Sacred Verve
A velvet antler climaxed. An ornament was born. Its other heir, the bee, needled its way through a collection of verbs. I atoned for the omitted chrysalis ritual with hands clipped short. Sedated apes settled under a drizzle. The lapsed omnivore swung its effusive braid.
Her story began, “Vents formed in the flaming underbelly of the salamander.” It grew a sibling from scrapes of grass. It bluffed listless eons of pollen.
I wept as I read it. My scaled eyes inverted. I kept vigil against corrupt acid flows. I held the sacred verve until the radiated eggs morphed into its only surface. They ripened to hatch.
Report from the Last Appalachian Palace
My machinery has a terrible horse
in its hinge.
My machinery nicks its lonely fingers
in the razor blade screed of a modular helmet.
I antecede through an hourglass.
The trees mimic ordinary sassafras.
My hand mimics the wings of
someone else’s dove drifting through
the soul’s unknown commonwealth.
There is no ash in my mouth, no ash on
my calcified tongue. From the balcony, from
the inside of religion’s impossible dictionary,
I looked out on a countryside of fictions.
It was already half eaten.
Hello; the windows are all painted. Hello; I’ve
seized the electrons in the dusky barrel
of my silhouette. Open it. Don’t
open it. It fingers like a gun.
Desert Thrashers
I think this is a photograph. I think you are in it. A woman slouches in the saddle. The flat top of a mesa scratches against cloudless blue. In and out of her horse’s lungs, the southwest air forms a clear, convincing math of things. It’s a question of shape, of curiosity at the way juniper and pinyon scrub look outward for a definition of a formal ending.
Coyotes are vagrants. Nomads cross rust-colored train tracks. They depart, puffed and monstrous with gaucho spirit and return with the winter. They have wandered entire regions.
Her saddlebags bulge with coins. They carry a private economy. She trades through settlements. Money rustles against sand, tamped down by wheels. Cattle roll over it in their sleep. At night bats flutter through, impotent as men. They leech electric zigzags from fields of sifting ash. Desert thrashers chirp over a wagon mound. The zest of their orange eyes.
A desert shines in the photograph. It’s stretching out, spreading like wings to the edge of the image. Each oasis is a crucifix. A lame plane: granular sand where sidewinders compress the night. The rider is about to blink; her eyes reflect moonlight through tears. And the horse nostrils quaver. They announce the coming of insidious sandstorms; the tearing open of pure emotion pressed out like oil from saddlebags.
Connor Fisher is the author of four chapbooks including 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.