Connor Fisher

Mansions of Ink

a truck disappears into subrational experience
here is your ladder and its swabbed-out throat 
the last act was replaced by a faded curtain
in the ink mansion where I make my home
light streams in as if the moon were assembled 
nightly for the view from a receding coastline 
*
my machine wants a bridge’s lexicon to evaporate
the way drapes disappear into lazy evenings 
rooted tendrils outlive images
compost clings to the word monument 
the dead wasp is tragic the same way an open hand
bounces back and forth from margin to margin
migrating swallows are smoke ribbons ornamenting 
the broken world with its radiant scenery
this scene is a system free from authority 
and a dance of dented harmonic orchestras

Scenes from an Unwritten Play

withdraw to your room when the spectacle ends
the logic of a lapel begins to flake away 
voices echo in the gills of a silverfish 
farther out where billboards code-switch the city 
into the language of musical inflection 
there is a mouth gaping beneath the novel
beneath a green dumpster, a mimicked bust
the landlord called an opera statute 
*
the green world sits just past a window painted shut
to resemble scenes from an unwritten play 
the first movement swells with a grace note’s 
stubborn whisper, the imprint of a complex organ
when the spectacle ends I will die in a poem
I will maunder through its remnant word garden

***

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.