Harrison Fisher

Flight of the Burning Koala  

Trigger warning:
Koalas are cute,
but

nature is red in tooth and claw,

and I bring
the destabilizing gaze
of the Nature Boy—

(t)read carefully.

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Just one match and the koala,
squishy with eucalyptus oil,
goes Poof!

—straight up like a sky lantern,

a fireball arcing over, then into
the sea—a greasy, tufted fatburger,
delicious char around the pelt,

and we are there to witness
the wild churn on the waves

as hungry pelagic creatures of every stripe
hurl themselves
jaws first

into the free-for-all conclusion
to “Flight of the Burning Koala.”

 

Conquest of the Goth-Hun

In old movies, people met and married within a few days.
Did real people ever do that, swept up in wedlock euphoria
left over from the Great War conquest of the Goth-Hun?

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In post-WWII cartoons, a bystander with a skinny neck
dwarfed by his collar would say feebly through his nose,
“I’ve been sick.” What illness of the time ravaged
these gaunt toons?  Audiences must have known.

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Minow’s “vast wasteland” was still nascent, untapped, 
soon stuck on westerns and WWII: 
pioneer trauma, global trauma.

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Emerging from the broadcast mists of picture tube gas,
we strode to school one weekend to take
the oral polio vaccine. People were better then;
even so, most have not survived.

 

Harrison Fisher has new work appearing in numerous magazines in 2025, among them All Existing, Amsterdam Review, The Broken City, The Corpus Callosum, eMerge, the engine(idling, The Kleksograph, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Metachrosis, Panoplyzine, Rat’s Ass Review, Rundelania, Slipstream, Trampoline, and Uppagus.