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

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from Issue 16 of Tyger Quarterly

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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.