Lisa Fishman : A Story

 

 

Only at night will I be able to see the next place, not always but at first:

I will arrive at night as if sneaking up on it, whether on foot or by car,

alone or in company.

 

*

 

It could always be night there. Further north, in a town I am getting to

know from a distance, the sidewalks are wooden boards and only one

street is paved. I would be in just a few hours of daylight for much of

the year. The year would progress with shocking slowness, it seems to me

from a distance; each “day” would be protracted across several days

before feeling complete. Therefore, the days might take longer, not go by

more quickly, each one being spread out across, say, a week, before the

amount of sunlight is felt by the body (by the skin, really, which first

perceives it) to have equalled a day.

 

Possibly, where it seems to be always night: more time.

 

*

 

When I had a miscarriage, that information came up from the ground,

not from the air full of sunlight or moonlight. “A story has to leave out

nearly everything or nobody can follow it,” my friend Kate wrote, but

not about this one. That’s different from what I thought she said—“A

story has to leave out nearly everything or else it won’t exist”—which

is how I hear it in my head now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lisa Fishman is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently One Big Time (Wave Books, 2025). In 2022, Gaspereau Press published her fiction debut, World Naked Bike Ride, shortlisted for the ReLit Award in Short Fiction. Her first novel, Write Back Now!, launches in May on 1366 Books, an imprint of Guernica Editions. Her work has been published and anthologized in Granta, jubilat, Volt, American Letters & Commentary, A Public Space, Best American Experimental Poetry, Aradia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, The Ecopoetry Anthology and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. A dual US/Canadian with roots in both Montreal and Detroit, Fishman divides her time between Eastern Canada and a farm in Wisconsin. She has recent prose here and here.