Eric Baus
The Worm's First Film
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Two horses climb a hive. The plumage around their waists retracts. "I ate mace," one thinks. "No one knows I ate mace." His mouth repeats a top lip twice. Don't tell my brother. Please. A still shows his core is a molting eel. It eeks some light then glows back in its hole. It grows glass from its face. It sleets. "No blinking," he says to himself, through his peel. He blinds his own ivory with the finest lamps. Does he seed a dot of blood? Do his teeth feed leaves? Clouds polish him plush. This is the last fence, dust. |
Obscured ElkAn inch of willow. Two days in sod. A reddened clover blotted with flakes. Burnt back to plastic, the radar beacons black. Torn asps and urn ants snow their insides to clumps. Felt drawn from obscured elk floods the pond until it sinks. The tarps evaporate. A flare emerges late to say, Hey lake, you lost your tree. |
Isis's SisterShe remembered her story. She was a sister looking down. She was etched in ash. She was so. She thought her mane would be sunned and it was. She was Iris, on the banks, in curls. |
Port FeverAn asp saw me floating. Keep swimming, it hissed. My lips were cropped by the silt in the stream. Iris called it "Cloud," fjording her gowns. |
Eric Bausis the author of The To Sound (Verse Press/Wave Books) and several chapbooks. His second full-length book Tuned Droves (Octopus Books) will be published in 2008. He edits Minus House chapbooks. He currently lives in Denver.
"I grew up in a little blue-grey house on 1515 Echo Lane in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the 1970s. There was not a front porch, but there were big green bushes as well as roses growing from wood chips by outside the front window. Now I live in a second floor studio apartment in Denver, so I do not have a front porch here either. I do try to keep flowers by the windowsill, generally carnations, because they are a little scary as well as being beautiful. I think they look like internal organs rather than prom corsages. Also, I can see a tree from here. Hello tree."
