Connor Fisher
Still Life with the Blind Girl
A city of clocks lay senseless, submerged in the imagined gulf. I stood among acolytes
while a ship of snares beckoned me aboard. The blind girl cried.
The blind girl cried, her hands folded together. A book in her lap. A kitten mewled,
keeping time with the score printed on its ribs. The sound received noise through a
satellite.
Like noise through a satellite, the cigarette’s smoke infiltrated winter’s collated fields.
The girl kept a birdcage at her bedside and the electricians of sleep worked at dusk.
Stray cats tiptoed through a park.
Stray cats tiptoed through a park and sniffed a frozen rose left behind on the windshield.
And in the earthquake, a capsized satellite flared, reflected in a horse’s limpid eye.
The Catalog of Natural Still-Life
Fields and their cotton bolls. Fields and their cornstalks. Laughter of a crow, a ripple of
black smeared across the blue. Each stuttering step of a fieldmouse. The hesitant
copperhead among phantoms. A mourning dove among phantoms.
A wolf; a sheep-killer. The sheep. The thousand droplets arrayed as a cloud in the shape
of a cathedral. Unseen stars as ambient backdrop. A single droplet hovering on a blade
of Indiangrass.
The sheep and the northern wind which cuts across tufts sprouted from topsoil.
Switchgrass on the tongue. Laughter of a crow and its brother from the sagging crest of a
telephone line. The air burning with sunlight in the cloudburst’s absence.
In the cloudburst’s absence, a sparrow-field grows flush with seedheads. The complex
angles of nested florets intersect each other, the wide-eyed jackrabbit as backdrop.
Orchards afar. Nested between: mule deer, having reaped low fruit. The rusted tractor.
The rabbit-fur and the rabbit. A buried spine. The raccoons and the raccoons’ bones.
Connor Fisher is the author of A Renaissance with Eyelids (Schism Press, forthcoming 2024), The Isotope of I (Schism Press, 2021) and three 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 writing 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.