Harrison Fisher


Theremin Toiletry Bag


That wild, quavering saw-song
will be the first thing 
out of the hotel room 
in Utica, New York,

after the dingy street scene
outside the train station 
like magical transport
to the Fifties, high tremolo, 

locals hiding among
marble pillars copped from Grand Central,
lone employee at the taxi desk, 
three sitters lost among the benches.

To the Radisson, please, where 
the Theremin’s music, conducted by
lethal toothbrush, will open 
the great maw of the toiletry bag, 

onrushing afflatus of
inner space meeting outer 
in the dictum of Proclus:
the universe is the statue of the intellect—

colloidal statues of gods,
their heads and arms 
sanded off: exfoliated,
fixed planets of the glow.



Climb Ev’ry Mountain


When “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”
was a banner hanging in 
the auditorium, theme of that school year
sixty years ago, I didn’t know
it was a song from The Sound of Music, 
which means “ev’ry mountain” 
was literally the Alps, evoking mountain airs
in my gray city elementary school,

and I am eyeballing a doe, a deer,
while the bee sips at the flower, sups,
then sops it all up.  The dog bites.
The bee’s sepsis / flower in flower.
Female deer / stings.
The needle is stuck / skips.
Painlessly casual deforester, I admit
I have written and rewritten 

and typed and retyped 
and thrown out and photocopied
and even mimeoed (a long time ago) 
and published many trees away, 
the clearings after such industry 
an unliving embodiment of
a body at rest tends to stay at rest, my self
gleeful and baldly montane in disrepute.



Non-Fiction Awards in Greater 5-Lined Skinks


Fugitive from the idealized past, 
when we were really real,
non-being still closes down
an option in the game
as meaning is bound to chance.

Always a phone call 
within the phone call—
Repentia 13: 
evidence of a horny god,
the motor in the gene pool.

Anyone who thinks he or she 
is a writer and contemplates
the rights and privileges 
pertaining thereto 
shall be considered a dope.



Medical Anomalies 


We once had a guy who was unaware
he had swallowed a mynah bird whole
and the bird was doing all his talking for him
from this little space at the back of his throat
the x-rays had missed the first time around.

+

When the first colonoscopy
revealed an improvised explosive device
had been implanted in the patient’s colon
high enough inside that it pressed on
his prostate, we now had an explanation
for why he was urinating so frequently
and producing such weak streams.

+

A patient’s hand had a smaller hand,
called a fractal hand, coming
right off the forefinger.
The fractal hand, being a fractal,
also had a fractal hand off its index,  
this one minuscule. As is the nature
of fractals, they repeated while scaling down
past the vanishing point. 
And not even the big hand worked.

Harrison Fisher edited and published the magazine Bingo Chow in the 70s/80s. He has published eight chapbooks and pamphlets of poetry since 1977, and also four full-length collections: Curtains for You (1980), Blank Like Me (1980), UHFO (1982), and Poematics of the Hyperbloody Real (2000).

 
 

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