Everything Breaks that Isn't Plastic by H.E. Fisher

                       lauren rushing CC



Everything Breaks that Isn't Plastic


Me and Toy go skinny-dipping 
after dark in the suburban canal, 
lit by back porch lights.

Toy is more fun than anyone 
with a reputation 
for being shatterproof

a living action figure 
manufactured with rivet-pocked arms  
designed to disrupt nature.  

Why crawl to Eden when it can be
run to in a vein? he reasons.

I haven’t called him by his real name 
since freshman year when we met,
a decade before his diagnosis. 

He says, I won’t be here long & adds, 
I want you to feel like you’re levitating
as if he’d laid waste to gravity.  

Night puts its ring on us, 
sparrows fly overhead,
extra bone in their tongues. 

Stray dogs trample Miracle-Gro blades 
dunk their muzzles into the brackish high tide.  
Do they know they are looking back at themselves? 

Stars breach, shake like Yahtzee-cup dice, tumble. 
The night-torn moon,
full from eating tides, howls.   

​


H.E. Fisher is pursuing her MFA (multi-genre) at City College of New York. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Okay Donkey, Pithead Chapel, Tiny Flames Press, and Animal Heart Press's anthology From the Ashes. She is the 2019 recipient of The Stark Poetry Prize in Memory of Raymond Patterson, and was shortlisted for the 2019 Barren Press Poetry Contest. Her lyrical essay, "Ocean: An Autobiography" (Hopper Magazine), was nominated for the Best of the Net (2019). Fisher is a writing tutor, and back-deck gardener with a wicked interest in medicinal herbs. She lives in Rockland County, New York.