The Invention of Algebra
Connor Fisher
Before the first transfiguration, starlings established a memory hum. I palmed the midnight sky. I crawled inside my own mouth and began to kiss the sheets of paper plastered between my uvula and the gorgeous mat of my tongue. A seal bladder exploded behind a bullet train. I froze my pores to an opal.
That night, sleep passed through the body of an osprey. A gymnast balanced on the fringe of a dead form. He was accustomed to moving as if through air and balancing along an infinite cord of silk, suspended above the raucous vacuum. He attended the landscape with silk transparencies.
After the invention of algebra, crustaceans annihilated the cat’s den. I was a single specimen, a buffalo in a world of luminous fir. Like a feudal lord, I was impaled on a lancet of boreal magnets. I cataloged the slippages of property. I held my paintbrush and swept oil along the luminous iris of a lynx. It wavered its march.
Connor Fisher is the author of The Isotope of I (forthcoming winter 2021 from Schism Press) and four poetry and hybrid chapbooks. 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 poetry has appeared in journals including Denver Quarterly, Random Sample Review, Tammy, Oxidant|Engine, Tiger Moth Review, and Clade Song.