From UDO KIER

1.
Welcome to the blood barn. Welcome
the ethereal thing. Mitochondrial collapse sounds
like gates of heaven swinging wide.
This kind of round lumpy wit
my mother spoke with. Birthstone disclosure.
Curbing disclosure of the whole point.

2.
Newest liturgy advocates the pinker spandex
In plyometric bursts––a chicken’s suffering,
final spasm. Unseasonably dumb in the
era of my harshest witness––Lamb
me up from the flock, father.
I’ve been so good all year.

3.
By “create” I mean of course
to get pissed off. The dislocated
anchoress yelling mid-bus gets me.
The artwork is a zone of
her defiant thinking with a title.
A barge called Cielo di Rotterdam.

16.
Only rats deserve opulence. Free jazz
jukes the categorical imperative. A noise
has no sovereign. The donkey brigade
dismounts to genuflect in the prairie.
They caught me in the synagogue
signing autographs: “Woefully yours, Paris Hilton.”

17.
Animals just live. People understand things.
Listen to Landslide from the backseat,
ultra-simple, like German Leider simple.
My boyfriend dropped the foul ball.
Did this bring shame to our section?
Does a goblin want a coin?

18.
Imagine getting your dessert gerrymandered.
Clarified butter mocks the lobster’s molting season.
Keep me past tense for my
own safety. Abandon Bob Hope. Verily,
adverbs unstick the matter’s soft claw.
All out of tokens. No prizes.

25.
Wine, water, urine, ume plum vinegar,
bay rum, ice milk, boric acid.
The doorknobs spoke. Malone died.
The doorknobs bled. My phone survived.
Did someone save the post office?
I dreamed I found the cure.

26.
Elected Nosferatu of the treasury board
after leading the league in injuries.
I reach for your hand like
a shadow. Who else will remind
the moon to do our bidding?
Butter this bread, comrade, or else.

27.
Life is right. Death doesn’t care.
The Navy has invented a device
to keep people from talking. It’s
moderately easy to romanticize existing but
not necessary. Two women are knitting
on this train. Who will win?

28.
Calibrate this bonsai, chica. Gutter’s full
of dead grenades and contraceptive runoff.
A new ecological wonder called idiopathy.
Trailed as the garçon of dearth.
My preacher’s homily swelled into new
weather. Open the refrigerator: still nothing.

29.
As a small child, I admired
my nice teacher, though I somehow
sensed she was a mean drunk.
What do I want from life?
Only to put a white scrunchie
on a white horse’s braided mane.

30.
They called me “Peaches the Dog”
in a menacing act of consecration.
We propagated an entirely lesbian oregano.
Ash from the Ganges is baritone.
The Rock of Gibraltar is contralto.
Rules are rules like pigeons swim.

37.
Last night we murdered the devil,
then queued up Lawrence of Arabia.
You laughed like those frightening silver
people who can’t die. Groundwater seraphim,
lend me your cool generational wrath.
It’s time to burn the wormwood.

38.
Or you can just steal things.
A parody always implies a precedent––
and good, death should be linear.
The big hoopla about ontology remits
our senses from their diligent work.
Show me one real American dollar.

39.
Tonight’s death match: bassoon prodigies versus
vicious crooners of the third kind.
Freaks emit tender vaporwave, dear reader.
Ladies of the canyon drink free.
I left it all on Potsdammerplatz,
down to my last grape popsicle.

40.
The prince of Moab resets his
callouses. A territorial advance of sand
means the water is further away.
Moloch me into complete divulgence. Otherwise,
these are my rubies. I count
backwards to galvanize the sleeping tiger.

41.
I work long hours as a docent
in Madonna’s house, behold coherence,
quiet ponding in each vestibule’s curve,
bent gently as a stem toward each
tearful visitor, his long shadow,
his little witness, his odd quest.

42.
Knighted at the intersection of pope
and gulag. My dowry of maize
for a suffering minstrel. Hildegard
of Bingen would have never. The codex
corrects our fictions of property. Fuck
school. Desalinate the language of sardines.

43.
Entry into another person’s language world
is all poetry affords us. Pleasure
on the latches, one strange occipital
kiss, weightless on a near-perfectly
ringing tonal brocade, harp to harp, to hear
the diaphanous vibrato en plein air.

44.
To each injustice a new money.
Gather the yeast before it expands.
Rebuild the pillory with laxative mercy.
Our striations of sound imprint upon
the indelible quartz. Cut me quick
with your soft edge. Queen’s gambit.

45.
The genius of the crofter’s daughter
baring one shoulder to the moon,
the other to the drifter, slow-dancing
to the Cars album the Cars.
The genius of the fish, drunk on
the dark liquor of the croft.

46.
I didn’t mean to schadenfreude. Take
my hand in parsimony. Labrador stupor
at the enzyme orgy provokes more
goo. Nothing good descended the paterfamilias.
Try to filibuster my birthday, senator.
I step inside my nightgown wantonly.

47.
Cats swarm the Marriott’s azalea grove.
In the thick carpet of the veranda
my daughter experiments with the conditional.
If krill, then whale. Remember how
a man is like a sixth
toe. You do not need one.

48.
Settled the apostasy with a peace
sign. Homer countervails the slick
mischief of El Barto. In the hostel
where Flarf died, a reddish egret
maims its lunch. Three power chords
can do the trick every time.

49.
Logjammed heaven with prayers for Harambe.
My vestigial nipples rediscover the milk
of their meaning. Balanced breakfast hardens
my carapace. Scurrilous flirtations pierce my
mettle. If you can imagine it,
it can fall from the sky.

50.
At which point, you catch it.
My baby reaches for serrated edges.
Flock of seagulls practicing high harmonies,
lost in long steppe grass. Court-martialed
for spilling yogurt on my toe.
I’m a humanist, so kill me.

51.
Too many spondees in this board
meeting. The empty cistern is proof
that beauty mattered once––the water
of it is so obvious. Cockatiels
torch my sheet music. I aspire
to clandestine clearance like a diamond.

52.
Even in the South, people hate
the South. With a novel comes
a sickening pressure to fit everything
ever thought into the first sentence.
But it’s not bragging if you
can do it, said Dizzy Dean.

53.
Call me Queen Catherine. Behead me
thrice. The palliative puce of this
smoothie may spurn my pleasure. Malcontents
squabble in the armory. I shave
them down to the nib. Utopia
in the flash of a knife.

54.
The Paris Review, cops. Yankees, cops.
The New Yorker emanates from Connecticut.
Like Mrs. Dalloway I will dash
my own head on the rocks.
Jump scare: a career in poetry.
No one owes anyone an email.

∩

Eric Tyler Benick is a writer from Tennessee. His collections include Terracotta Fragments (Antiphony, 2026) and the fox hunts (Beautiful Days, 2023). Various works appear or are forthcoming in Apartment, Bennington Review, Chicago Review, Copper Nickel, Harvard Advocate, Mercury Firs, NOIR SAUNA, Protean, and elsewhere. A 2026 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Nonfiction Literature, he lives and works in New York City. 

Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She is the author of Learning (Joyland, 2026), The Lamb With The Talking Scroll (Blush, 2025), A Movie (Lavender Ink, 2025),  I Love Information (2023), and Every Book Is About The Same Thing (2022).