from Terracotta Fragments

XLVIII

a dowry of dairy for the milkmaid’s hand in marriage
Captain Beefheart covers at the Sleepy Hollow bacchanal
crab apples roll down vales of thyme and timothy
my first epistemological panic watching Purple Rain
yakuza bodysuits throughout the gastropubs of Oregon
Pistol Pete sweeps a defense out of their Knickerbockers
my first sexual awakening to Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2
Raskolnikov’s terror flagellated by platza
urbane usurer expects interest on every eucharist
tubercular garrets of the Counter-Enlightenment
my first illness came in couplets, clad in thunder

XLIX

Celan bears witness through neologism
cherry blossoms divorced of meaning
divorces still cherried with mourning
hammer as a tool and synecdoche
Luddites dismember the automation
Bolshevik materialists with a dead tsar
Mishima’s reactionary body of seppuku
mezzo-soprano of an orientalist Egypt
metallurgist kisses the casing of every bullet
whispers of breath from the end of the flute
my hand forgets everything it touches

L

all cherry cola and Lexapro libido
all Don Juans and Dorothies in dungarees
all grubworms and gibbons ex machina
all saline and syntax as salubrious strategies
all knaves with knives at the end of a chord
all proselytes performing the seminary sex sequence
all droughts in Hollywood, all draughts in Dublin
all darling derrières doomed to effluvia 
all of us fetishists when faced with the eternal
all prosody an imprudent and palliative pursuit
all eleven liars hang the jury to heaven

LI

Buddhist penises weaponized as warplanes
guerilla ambush of coffee through the colon
my fugitive alias rendered through la petite mort
grief counselor texting me on Giving Tuesday
described my political struggle as mankini Marxism
the love of my life doomsday prepping in the underwear department
Arthur Russell’s warped cello ironizes the KMart
purple rabbits on cousin’s lawn, a premature shotgun
my second circumcision scars a circumflex
my domestic migraine colors the sunrise Coors Light
the IRS rejects my appeasement of Negative Dialectics

LII

sycophants julienne their fingers into mise en place
bitumen and blood still left from the Bugatti collision
fast food workers narcing from the drive-thru
stubborn Hegelians incapable of mirth
no matter which side of the squirt-pee dialectic
Bosniak nationalists struggle to supplant the Serb
my Croatian father’s cushy job installing sheetrock
and his father’s lazy ass hogging the intubation
all of my dalliances in a diseased denouement
my fresh set of lavender linens ruined
by modern life’s happy, inevitable sodomy

LIII

dialogist dependency on diacritics and diuretics
toxic adhesives of the hackneyed endodontist
Hippocratic Oaths under coercion of the casting couch
falafel debates bombed by the IDF, forensics obliterated
hip replacements exacerbated by Steely Dan
bacon egg and cheese salt pepper ketchup
the waiter’s cruising wink bespirits my largesse
wasp after wasp embalmed in fuck of the fig
even Joey Chestnut on hunger strike
barefoot on Brighton Beach, one with the soft metals
nobody, not even the rain, knows it’s my birthday

∩

Eric Tyler Benick wrote the fox hunts (Beautiful Days, 2023) and Memory Field; A Travelogue of Forgetting (Long Day, 2024). With Nick Rossi, he runs Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of shorter poetics. His recent work has appeared in Bennington Review, Brooklyn Review, Copper Nickel, Harvard Advocate, NOIR SAUNA, and Puerto Del Sol. His most recent chapbook, Solip Schism, is now available from Blue Bag Press. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches postcolonial and anti-carceral literatures at Wagner College where he is criminally adjunct.