from “fox hunts”
~
somewhere hidden on the high line
fox has weaponized pastiche
like an x-man or john cassavetes
and can harness the red light of a summer squall
fox possesses the great animal genius
the flemish painters sought in slaughter
everyone knows a fox
in new york is a bad idea
and none more so than fox
who’s gone transcendental among the tulips
resplendent in his raiment of rain
conducting sorrows and shadows
like a lotus of bodhisattva
the wet wind off the hudson
making maelstrom of manhattan litter
fox is a fixed object
stripped like an orange
as an answer to the rain
**
from “vole clock”
/
quietly coughing thunder
braised the air of alabama
as the bronze effigy was pulled
from the public square
like a rotten tooth
the third in its likeness
a hat trick of justice
albeit retroactive
vole is a tender artichoke
bleary below a buick
from a bad season’s nap
but fistbumps the air
in celebration hoping
there will be a party
which is a pity
no one gave him the news
we don’t party anymore
**
from “mothman retrograde”
*
everyone’s favorite porcine capsule
unctuous mothman takes the wheel
with all their vitamin strength
eyes inert like miami neon
hungry for the insurrection
their dreams black as goyas
a ballroom of billionaires hang
from their own balustrade
and sway in nocturnes
mothman so horny for revolution
they’re nearly inept but who else
to reverse the tidal swells
the curse of federal negligence
these odious engravings of men
on mountains each world
more onerous than the one it survives
and mothman’s seen them all
both as fact and phantasm
every single soldier of art killed
or subdued basquiat became a glove
of money and bob dylan peeled back
his amphibian skin and what happened
to lil kim who could have castrated
an army with her cadence
loaded on long island iced tea
mothman has lost all practical function
and clings to a few explosive frames
of diegetic action because like keanu reeves
mothman is immortal and can leave the sequence
from points a and b to special effects and bad writing
still greased up from the barbecue and blissfully sunk
by benzodiazepine the night is a cherry in their jowl
the rich lights of the art basel soon to be subsumed
by the solid fats of a forced animal
**
ERIC TYLER BENICK is a writer, publisher, and educator living in Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of the chapbooks Farce Poetica (Spiral Editions, 2022), I Don’t Know What an Oboe Can Do (No Rest Press, 2020), and The George Oppen Memorial BBQ (The Operating System, 2019), as well as a co-founding editor of Ursus Americanus Press, a chapbook publisher. More recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, The Harvard Advocate, Meridian, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. His debut collection of poems, the fox hunts, is forthcoming from Beautiful Days Press.
