ERIC BENICK
Ecdysis
of me
so necessitates
new form
blue callow
meat naked
below bone bellows
in me
extricates the raw whole
scared safe
and unseen without
armor subverts
the body’s empty function
air wet
with nauseous muscle
about me alive
alongside this pallid mirror
my swift nature
builds brand new
a pretty
pragmatic vehicle
Abyssal Gigantism
wherein too deep besets casual
swim begets bioluminescent
the hook’s arced anger scarce
black’s adapted colossus knowing
what can be known piece by piece
a wounded whale albatross
innards Antarctic toothfish sad eye
spies what stirs in the silt larger
than hypothesis a child with book glowing
nightmares its slippery tendril welting the wall
of water skull quiet
asleep in its cold seep
Autosarcophagy
because I wanted to be
a flower self-
sustained in
biosoliloquy
I bit off a little
at a time
at first cuticle
and callous before
the hunger cultivated
a fuller mouth
skin’s live olive torn
white and then its dark
pressure would salve
the gash and watch
it grow back external
internalized externalized
began to grow teeth
in entrails the body’s middle
mouth bellyful of hair
babies smitten rat
kings begat a new sex
pistillary navel copulated
carried swelled indigestible
when
they
cut
me
open
my
whole
kingdom
bowed
Eric Tyler Benick is co-founder and editor at Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of chapbooks. His poems have appeared in The Vassar Review, Reality Beach, Bad Nudes, decomP, Souvenir, Fruita Pulp, Fog Machine, and elsewhere. He is a current MFA candidate for Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. He lives in the Bronx.