noteworthy
In each issue, the editors choose a writer they would like to bring
to the readers' attention.In this issue, Nate Fisher is highlighted.
Nate Fisher, graduate of the M.F.A. program at Moscow, Idaho, writes poems that are elegant and disturbing. From a father that's going "... to kill the governor...," to a mother that will only exist in an old film, Nate makes remembrances in these poems, or dedications to ghosts long gone. With both a fierce ear and eye, Fisher navigates pain and loss with the surety of a seer.
Watching My First Steps On Super 8
Deputization
To Keep Abreast of the Incurable Is Not Our Station
Propulsion
To the Breaker Box Inside the Robert Frost Barn
Bounty
Watching My Fist Steps on Super 8
The feet, the gravity in waiting
The frame slows, my mother dancing
forward with legs pinned to her sundress,
arms shaped into an anchor ready to hook
around my chest, to keep my noise upright.
Her face fills the frame for a moment,
and I stop the reel. In three measures
of heat and light, her eyes tic tic tic
then parade rest. The top lip suspended
in parting, an opening mouth caught
on a syllable, exposed to the brine and shoal
of film grain, the illusion of wall behind,
devoured more as notch moves to notch.
Some days my mother-in-film tells me,
I have not gone, I have not been created.
Other days she says run
I am a transient builder of roads, sitting here,
throned by balcony, pipe dusted with scratch,
my cup overfloweth with that’s an okay healthy
amount of whiskey I think; I’ll be your ambassador
of consumptive darkness tonight. Go ahead,
take off. I will describe the ghosted heat
and the parlance of all bodies cooling.
I’ll detail the stray cat that has wandered up
to sup on my booze, I’ll press my cheeks to the earth
and mark it with pheromones. Go home,
this all is mine now. I’ll do these things so you
don’t have to. So you can sleep. So you can stay in
and not be gunned down by forces that march
beyond my porchlight. I will dig for you, the tunnels out,
not in spite of, but because— I know not who you are,
and cannot help myself.
To Keep Abreast of the Incurable Is Not Our Station
It’s 3 PM on a July day at the Illinois State Fair and my father
has announced to the cotton candy vendor, “I’m gonna kill the fucking governor.”
I drag him out by the nape of his blue flannel, dark with drunk.
He smells of the last job he held, insulating and installing car doors.
I give myself an exercise: how many tablets, how many powders,
what amount of Schlitz does my father need to feel pride in his work?
How many children have fallen out of faulty doors, how many
of his doors have trapped families in their seats as they burned
under his quaking hands. Is this how he plans to kill
the governor; I mean, is this the plan, 19 years
in the making? Will asking a state trooper
for the make and model of the governor’s vehicles
make me complicit? I never threatened to burn down a house
with my wife and two sons inside, like he did, but my grandmother
confuses my father and me in photos, says,
“You look a little lost, like he did.” and “Are you praying every night?”
My car’s lost in the fairgoing trenches of paid parking,
and we search for hours, one of my ears corkscrewed with constant menace:
going to blow up the governor’s mansion you best believe
or
you hear me motherfuckers give us back our car—
At this moment, I realize— I’ve never forgotten where I’ve parked
in a more remote and emptied place than the outer pavilion of the State Fairgrounds,
and yes, I consider this. I consider it. I consider the mud
we’re now in. I consider my hands. I consider the whiteness
of thumbs to a whiskered throat.
Breathing for the both of us, I repeat to myself,
“to keep abreast of the incurable is not our station.”
I’m not sure what this means or where I’ve heard it,
but these are the words that loosen my grip and keep me from
(I thought my son loved me)
not undoing that which I do not love
(I thought my son loved me)
As he repeats
(I thought my son loved me)
over and over and
(I thought my son loved me)
I wonder which factory installed my car doors
(I thought my son loved me)
so that I can lock them,
his body inside— safe and asleep
in the back seat.
A set of eels born apart, each during
a different World Series. This
separation, these portions of mind
and body, are the creatures
of heart as bento box. Handcuffed
to a paper birch, I call out to the field
for a squadron of limbs, of lumbar,
of language, mouths, saints named
after moths— I have a confession.
These have always been fan blades,
never wings. Never noticing until this moment
that something always sounds like death
out here. Carrion birds canvassing
the carcasses of cartwheels and other
“kah” sounds: Cardium. Cauliflower. Cockpit.
As a boy I dreamt of becoming Yuri Gagarin
or the Vostok rocket itself,
until I read about Erich Warsitz, first
to tame the airbreathing jet engine.
My molars buzzed with the channeling
of his Heinkel He 178 Turbojet, screaming
all apostles overhead, through screen doors,
into ear canals on an interception course.
I remain to this day a man underwhelmed by earth.
Shackle me to a wind turbine, clocktower,
anything turning away but eventually
returning to a rise. My feet break open
on soil. My bones drag like a plow.
If I be traitor, then carry on with it,
load the cannon with my gristle and fire
until I mist aware, color this birch
the red face of winded. Search now
for division, and find only rice, rice again,
rice again— call on the maker of lunchboxes,
if you are at all interested in the difference
between when man was wire and wire was word.
To the Breaker Box Inside the Robert Frost Barn
Your name alone is in momentum
for breakage, to tear out the laces
of my shoes and use them to corral
the chairs out of the barn and into
the birches where they can rake
their antlers against bark, mewling.
Mewling as I do, stomping the bulbs
of floodlamps so the floods may bypass
their scarecrow. I devour the wiring
like black licorice, I shout tales
at the heart beneath the floorboards:
Mend this wall, goddamn you.
I’ve been an angry man. Say that
out loud. ANGRY MAN. Once “Angry
Young Man,” but I am losing adjectives
to scatter for deer, because maybe they eat those.
Maybe the deer have been angry and break,
as well. They may be hungry. Hunger,
the destroyer.
I break and break
but I am not
the destroyer.
Find them. Point them out.
Make it a mob action.
Find them and bring a box,
pack up what I’ve broken,
and return it to me,
please. Let me build
for you all again.
Initiate my fingers with fish hooks,
so that I may better clutch at the tailcoats
of escaping souls. My bones are hollow,
yet filled with the dry click of thumbs snapping
to get their attention. To correct the posture
of the mouth, so that one may not slip out
while cattlecalling a banshee.
There are avenues in the forest
that only phantoms shuffle through,
hemp and cuff cutting ringlets
into wrists and ankles. I gnaw
on the leather cord of my binoculars,
scan the treeline for gowns that rise
like orchids peeling. For fedoras
balanced on broomsticks, the brims
slicing through underbrush.
The sun plummets into soil, cadaverous,
and I unfurl my bedroll and kit,
start a fire kindled from baby teeth.
This is the moment in which they prowl to me,
to warm themselves, to wonder, as I do,
what we are tracking the other for.
Nate Fisher has made a habit of collecting degrees in Creative Writing since 2007. His holy academic trinity is comprised of a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maine-Farmington, an MA in Creative Writing from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, and an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Idaho-Moscow. His work has been most recently featured in Four Chambers Press and Booth Journal. He currently teaches Literature & Composition Studies at Southeastern Louisiana University. He names writers Fernando Pessoa, Maurice Manning, William Stafford, Maggie Nelson, film director Jeff Nichols, musician Townes Van Zandt and visual artist Yves Klein among his chief party guests for inspiration.
