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.