Connor Fisher
The Contaminated Tongue
From a perch in the park, I listened to waste trickle through aging infrastructure.
Mineral scrap clogged the ditches as highways sloughed into an emerging ocean. Like a
mass of snakes, discarded tires crawled beneath dead limbs. Their centers gaped like
mouths. Memories of tar seeped up from bedrock slabs as another plague threatened to
advance. The ground-squirrels’ burrows aped cicada mounds. Their black memories
haunted this poisoned space of roots and leaves, earthworms rendered as knots formed
a hieroglyph of animal squalor.
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 Clade Song. He currently lives and teaches in northern Mississippi.