Deleted Leaves from the Datura Plains
by Eric Baus
| The lost chorus clumped. Barely a piece of mica. The moist, injured data. Some spots in the mouth. Barely a streak. A bell versus a voice. Some fluttering. A bell beside a voice. |
Barbed Ghost
by Eric Baus
| When I drew the drowned lagoon from my brother’s memory, each subterranean particle unearthed another tendril. One waved back, until I recognized the stride of its call. Then a film formed on the surface, a screen for silt portraits usually reserved for the bottom of a foot. I was welcomed into the new noise by a barbed ghost, flushing up to the crested pool’s lip. I was tread upon while it held a stone under my tongue to say, “It is under my tongue that speaks.” That crust of salt that kills the fish will wash over our digits, a flood pointing to itself to rearrange sails, but where was the angle I had circled around, like a host bit by a wounded book, freshly swept from the errata’s limb, winding back dawn, wandering through? |
Inside the Cathedral of Clearcut Trees
by Eric Baus
| An internal cadaver reversed a void into the destroyed organs of its dormant twin. The reflections paired exhaust. After the spores spread, their height was clothed in mimetic water while a second stream wrapped the tongues, brushing two tape heads together long enough to record whatever curved phonology answered back. They wore one another to swim past the brackish harm. They reddened the book of tacit dressings with a bloody fog but there was a boom behind the sky the whole time. In the tallest grasses, in a bee among bees, in itinerant light, another moss, more soot, beneath the beets, the remains renovated their dew. |
Neutral Cloud
by Eric Baus
| When I stood to hear the wave coat the corridor, a second sound, training to steer me, wormed over my tracks. It swayed me to look like a man looking for an animal in a darkened room. Windy, broken swarms. Displaced peaks. I was not this tone’s pupil, building an engine to burn myself down, but a pebble taught to hover above a sleeping hound. |
Eric Baus is the author of “The Tranquilized Tongue” (City Lights, 2014), “How I Became a Hum” (Octopus Books, 2016), and other books. He is a faculty mentor in poetry at Regis University’s Mile High MFA Program in Denver.
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