Nicky Beer is the author of The Octopus Game (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015) The Diminishing House (Carnegie Mellon, 2010). Her poetry has been published in Poetry, The Washington Post, The Nation, Best American Poetry, McSweeney’s, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from […]
To me, you have bequeathed a half-dissolved apple, a spider, and three crescents of your fingernails. A large Y of black stitches has split your trunk into thirds— a child’s rendition of a bird migrating towards your feet. The arc of the scar on your right calf reminds me of a hooked trout […]
Every movement of my body is a genuflection to stone, my flesh a chalice for dust, which is itself the dry ghosts of flesh. It is true that I have had my dalliances with the odd toadstool, the bulbous contours of their weeping bride-heads, but oh my love, consider the rare patience of […]
At first, I can’t name the bird falling deliberately from the tree’s high crooks: a grey flash, tipped with carmine. Lit on a fencepost, its wings smolder. It must smell of ginger. Bird, your life would terrify me. Bones full of air, belly full of hunger, the underbrush dense with murders. Death is a twist, […]
The two bones that form the framework of the forearm. I sing of arms . . . From their names alone, they could have been another pair of Virgil’s jilted: two slightly horsey, big-boned sisters lovesick over the same sailor who had his hometown stenciled […]
aka Ichneumonid wasp An obsidian, Croenenbergian prop, the horrifying marriage of organic and engineered, like the hinged, chitinous cunts of those larval aliens famed for chestbursting. Landing on the stove, it renders the rococo contours of the spaghetti spoon vaguely sinister. Nerve and […]
The tank bubbles intermittently, but there is no tide to sway her into grace. Turn, and in your peripherals there’s a sudden flex, a time-lapse lily blossoming into your blind spot. Trebled, as if by volition, now spread against almost the entirety of the glass, she obscures her […]
The blue-ringed octopus is one of the most poisonous […]