by Harrison Fisher

Loup amore


Even he who is pure in heart 
and says his prayers by night
can become a wolf
when the wolfbane blooms

and the autumn moon
hits your eye 
like a big pizza pie.

Good Country


In a good country,
“open carry” refers to
this beer in my hand.

Generation Greatest


They decoded Joyce’s masterworks
as baby talk.
After whole work lives of repression, 
World War II came back 

toward the end
as the only thing that mattered, 
long after Julius wooed Ethel 
with song:

Don’t sit under the mushroom cloud
with anyone else but me, 
anyone else but me etc.  
Alone, Enola,

I am become death,
destroyer of worlds, paying for
your educations and houses
in new developments,

and I will send
into your streets men of good humor, 
tintinnabulators to tinkle in
the long summer ease.

Saturday Morning Cartoon


The pink, rounded bottom loved around 
the world, the shiny black hooves,
he never wore pants,

he stuttered “that’s all, folks” when everyone knew
there was more, children’s balloon cartoon 
minds carried off by the pink deeps,

they have no entrance, the sphere turns without
distortion, and this is true morning
from sweat at last.

Fairy Tale


That sound sleeper 
in the chaise longue

is a sleeping beaut—
booby trap!

The falls of Constantinople, 
Hyperion, 
the House of Usher.

The falls of mother,
child, and laundry.

Who moved the sprinkler?
The famous beanstalk.

Harrison Fisher has published twelve collections of poems since 1977, most recently Poematics of the Hyperbloody Real (2000).   After a long hiatus from poetry (most of the 21^st century), he published new poems in 2022 in BlazeVOX, e-ratio, and Otoliths, among other magazines, and has appeared in a dozen more in 2023, including Amsterdam Review, Apocalypse Confidential, Misfitmagazine, the two last issues of Otoliths, and the first of #Ranger.  Fisher lives in upstate New York.