PROSE POETRY

HARRISON FISHER
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THE FOUR SKULLS OF JONATHAN DRAKE

I have read more than once, in matter targeted to gentlemen, that we should use black shoe polish not only on black shoes but brown ones, too, so I tried that. The fruit of such unholy advice is now on my feet. My brown shoes display an inky malady. I have crossed something like a sartorial blood-brain barrier, my frame ending in pedal illness, a blotchy mess where I meet the globe and the globe recoils, post-industrial stain spreading across notional nations of the one ocean on earth, the echoes of blue-green deployment out in the globe room of our green world, blue waters that I swear by the four skulls of Jonathan Drake, and the shrunken heads boiled and stitched from each, are still gloriously alive.

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Harrison Fisher has published twelve chapbooks and collections of poems since 1977, most recently Poematics of the Hyperbloody Real. See his latest published poems in 2026 in The Broken City, Poetry Super Highway, Rundelania, and Stone Circle Review.