Poetry by Connor Fisher

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I am cheerful; I am a great painter like Diego
Rivera. I eat cookies with two hands and babble like a
child. In Antigua, I lost my way among volcanoes. I sipped
rum with taxi drivers while the underground swayed.
Rum tied me to the railroad tracks and I wrote poetry
to escape.

Dogs with ornamental mange slept beneath the
convent. They were scholars who spoke of coffins decked in
purple. I tucked mangoes beneath my shirt to fool Jesus.

In Antigua, I burned my name to speak with birds. The lady-
bug became my wife. I ate the stars and picked my teeth
with the spines of prickly pear.

I bathed in a jaundiced convent while sculptures of cats
watched me dance naked. Nuns have eyes like
socialists, eyes like the flowers of peace. They cast nets
around the earth to capture green birds. They hate all men.
The revolution belongs to them.

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Connor Fisher is the author of A Renaissance with Eyelids (Schism Press, 2024), The Isotope of I (Schism Press, 2021) and three poetry and hybrid chapbooks including The Unholy Moon (salò press, 2024). 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, the Colorado Review, and Diagram. He currently lives and teaches in northern Mississippi.

Photo by Miguel Urieta on Unsplash