fox hunt

blitzed again by human architectures i’ve never had a chance

but to persimmon pink into the city sewers

in the valleys of camperdown elm some call it respite what i do

with my hands in all my shivering urgency

a rabbit stops me in my tracks and riddles me useless

his soft escape a nimble and needful praxis

the young boys slap their big bellies in the water

the sound rustles the grass as a viper striking

the runner in park slope is little more than his flopping penis

which he has advertised discerningly at the front of his body

i’ve been lucky to see appalachia in autumn where the good dirt

directs the vast vegetable singers

i am not the wiser cat who can make meaning from the mountains

if i speak at all it is as a defense

wouldn’t it be so quaint a practical solution for this noise

how we could all lie down without dying to do so

i pause somewhere between rest and resolution

a woman cries fox and i scatter beneath the pale fear of the village

---

ERIC TYLER BENICK is the author of the chapbooks 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 founding editor at Ursus Americanus Press, a chapbook publisher. His work has appeared in Bat City Review, Armstrong Literary, Washington Square Review, 3 A.M. Magazine, Birdcoat Quarterly, Mount Island, Ghost Proposal, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.

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