Fable Song // Christopher Morgan

1. Carved from a fallen tree,

the walking stick

shatters a mace

2. Slice the monster’s head

and it regrows. Feed it

and it withers

3. Much to everyone’s astonishment,

the talking parrot reveals

it was magical all along

4. The God wolf brings down

its mountainous paw,

cleaving a skyscraper

5. After the eruption,

car-sized hornets returned

to their volcano nest,

carrying a woman and her child

6. An astronaut discovers

his guiding star

was an abandoned satellite

7. Having restored peace

to the hummingbird kingdom,

the bat with no shadow

flew back to the moon

8. Each day, the angel

on the tiny planet

resisted dreaming

of cliffside promises

9. An emotional robot

discovers fantastical beings

guarding a castle

inside the dying boy’s heart

10. Finding the never-ending avocado,

a former beggar fed his village

11. Prisoners danced feverishly

while the eye remained shut,

only to fall silent when it opened

12. After the last human died,

all together and all at once,

the birds of the world began to sing

13. At the end of the forest-wrought trail,

a smiling blind bear asks wanderers

what they’re afraid of

—to survive, say nothing at all

14. Having a touch that turned

anything into flowers,

the boy finally found peace

in his self-imposed garden

//

Christopher Morgan is a Lebanese American prose poet who grew up in Detroit, the Bible Belt of Georgia, and the San Francisco Bay Area, where he currently lives and co-manages Nostrovia! Press. The author of two chapbooks, “Shadow Songs” (Sad Spell Press 2015) and “Fables with Fangs” (Ghost City Press 2016), he’s also the Reviews Coordinator at Alien Mouth. He loves hiking in the redwoods, aphorisms, and happy hour margaritas.