Max Fischer
“On Sunday, I Performed an Autopsy”
You always knew how to open beer cans and test tubes with a flick of your wrist: thumb and forefinger snapping the lid like a chicken’s neck, like my neck had when your brother texted me—
She deleted all of your messages.
I never thought I’d be using forensic terminology—definitions on flashcards you recited over and over—to unpack your absence: the time we’d spent laughing in empty cornfields and racing down Iowa backroads now infarctions to my heart as it tourniquets.
You always knew I was never meant to be a girl like my birth certificate intended, yet you blocked me the day after I started to transition. You always knew how to crack me open, and without you in my life, I am the adipocere—wax and wet and decomposition—slipping through the memory of fingers when you’d lace them through mine—to comfort but never to confide.
I hadn’t known what you seemed to all those years ago: the only unkillable aspect of what we meant to each other is [the loss of] us.
“a guide to home transition remedies”
when stars jut from your collarbones, etch the words love yourself into glass shards from a broken cabernet bottle opened during a gender reveal party. 
  stitch lists of boy names into your wrists: liam, noah, oliver, james, wallace, will.
  stain your skin with clouds, stain your identity with the sound of the wind winding through daydreams, through locks of hair, through bloodstained baby teeth left under a pillow for two dollars. 
  carry in your palms empty understandings, empty caskets for a funeral of syllables. 
  tear those stars from your skin like blisters and stash them in strangers’ pockets for a rainy day. 
  navigate your star-shaped wounds trickling stardust onto your mother’s cursive handwriting. don’t map the rivers they make; you don’t want to find out that the true meaning of growing up is breaking up with the daughter your parents wanted you to be—cut yourself out of yourself, snip the childhood from your waist, dye your hair the color of faded cornstalks from a stephen king movie, and bury six letters inside you. 
  cram that dying name down your throat, take a kitchen knife, scavenge ink from the night, and carve open the constellations for a new name. 
  ask the cornfields and the scared crows nestled within: “how do you spell me, without a birth certificate, without the shards of who i was born to be?”
  ask the grieving girl you pretend to be: “what kind of child am i if i kill the one gift mom gave me?”
Bio
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Max Fischer is a transgender, Pushcart Prize nominated author who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. His work focuses on queer joy told through the lens of unconventional narrative structures and the merging of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is a 2025 Milkwood Writers Resident and a 2025 New Roots Artist Resident. His most recent publications include POETRY Magazine and Paranoid Tree Press.