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  1. Mark Rutter
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  3. Aristilde Kirby
  4. Eric Tyler Benick
  5. Joan Tate
  6. Zack Darsee
  7. Kiera O’Brien
  8. Beatrice Martini
  9. Bill Hollands
  10. Rainer Diana Hamilton & Violet Spurlock

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TYGER QUARTERLY

TYGER QUARTERLY





        Eric Tyler Benick






Hyperbolic Chamber

I may have pissed on the jellyfish preemptively

I may have been under the influence of marzipan

I may have confused love and liability again

I may have accused my critics of nepotism

I may have stomped the gadfly out of malice

I may have flirted completely outside of my century

I may have fudged the nomenclature at my height of credibility

I may have flapped my wings too late in the fall

I may have embezzled your social currency in a frenzy

I may have asked the mayor “May I have another?”

I may have manipulated my mother into my birth

I may have mortared myself behind the Victorian portrait

I may have mistaken the sabertooth tiger as the sleeping buddha

I may have engineered an answer to the poem

I may have lost the answer in a gentleman’s bet

I may have rewritten the jellyfish scene with more interiority

I may have squandered my life’s splendor in the first act

I may have been superfluous at worst or a foil at best

I may have been more of myself in someone else’s memory




Hyperbolic Chamber

Thrilled to be crowned “Miss Parsimonious”

Thrilled to win a lifetime of salt

Thrilled that the degree came with enough rope

Thrilled to have written Being and Time and a Secret Third Thing

Thrilled to do the worm at the corporate merger

Thrilled to be wielding the crimson sword

Thrilled that the valium is kicking in

Thrilled to be disbarred in a field of rhubarb

Thrilled to peep the goings-on of the conclave

Thrilled that my divorce granted me weekends with subjectivity

Thrilled that my next wife will love the broken half of me

Thrilled to lobby for my own execution

Thrilled to receive God through tick-borne illness

Thrilled to be flogged by the cherub of fortune

Thrilled to dry out in the rain shadow

Thrilled that my past life was all a corgi’s dream

Thrilled to be conscripted as a t-shirt cannoneer

Thrilled to be widowed by my own ego-death

Thrilled that the sovereign found me funny enough to feed




Biographical Statement

Eric Tyler Benick is a writer from Tennessee currently based in Brooklyn. His poetry collections include Terracotta Fragments (Antiphony, 2026) and the fox hunts (Beautiful Days, 2023) He is a founding editor of Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of shorter poetics. His work has appeared in Apartment, Bennington Review, Brooklyn Review, Chicago Review, Copper Nickel, Harvard Advocate, NOIR SAUNA, Puerto Del Sol, and elsewhere.