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Curious Specimens by Various, eds. Wren Hanks & Beth Couture Sundress Publications — Free (PDF) Poetry (Anthology)
Featuring the work of Eric Baus, Mathias Svalina, Emily O'Neill, Sonya Vatomsky, Moss Angel, and MANDEM, among many others, Curious Specimens is an anthology of the strange and wondrous things that make us human.
Eric Baus
The To Sound by Eric Baus
So one of my friends was doing a Friday Five book meme on Dreamwidth, and it looked fun, and I thought, "Hey, I want to do that!" And then I realized that I 100% do not have the patience to actually write about five different books that I've loved and hated at various points throughout my life, so instead I will tell you about a single book that's been a kind of formative, pivotal North Star to me throughout my entire adult life: The To Sound by Eric Baus.
It's a book of poetry, and the best way I can describe what it is is by saying that it's a text that only makes sense when seen from the corner of your eye. Try to look directly at it, and the meaning evaporates.
Here's one of the poems from that book:
The sisters of the broken candle covered every window in the house with x-rays of my bandaged eye. "working backwards from the sky" says she follows every fissure until it's time for the stitches to come out. When something falls you should pick it up. "spilled sand and lamplight" has been my sister for a while now. They say we are slivered glass. Fluttered numbers and milk. Flickers sutured in skin. They tried to convince me that half the word filament is night. Every rattled out lightbulb means a brother's pillow is burning. We all watch the clock. Eyes running out of aluminum.
I painted the final lines of the book on a piece of wood, and I have hung it in every single bedroom I've had since I was 17. It's still in my bedroom right now. The sign says, "You are the one after end, the burned bird I woke up in."
Eric Baus // Burning Zither
The To Sound, Eric Baus (2004)
The sisters of the broken candle
““spilled sand and lamplight” has been my sister for a while now.”
“Every rattled out lightbulb means a brother’s pillow is burning.”
They wanted me to hold the bird calmly (for title)
I was thinking birds with extremely long necks (entire poem)
“and my sister sees / a voice / I was using words I didn’t know / my mouth uses rain to say / she nods and we know / the body is a sequence”
Untitled, pg. 19 (entire poem)
“my sister was thinking / placing flames / I was a scatter of birds / next to each other”
“she was looking for some handwriting / to pull across her lips”
“I was using the gape / in my sister’s mouth // seeing the word sun”
Dear Birds, I’m running out of numbers.
“We are all so far from home.”
“watching carp lunge onto rocks, like being able to walk made us the solution for water.”
Dearest Sister, Thanks for leaving me space to sign my full name in your absence.
“I sent you postcards from every skylit exit. Did you get the one when I thought the word sun in my mouth would keep us both warm? We both know glare is not enough border: bending light is a form of precision.”
“I can treat all this traffic like a single evening voice.”
While the somnambulist explains the proper way to carve the eyes from a pigeon,
“He thinks about the three minutes he stopped breathing in saltwater. Closing his lids at fish. Wondering why his shirt felt like skin.”
“He speaks softly with empty sleeves. Says a bird losing altitude is a new kind of rain. Roughly equivalent to the fluid in my ears.”
Dear Birds, You can say I contact whoever is in the memorized room,
““the shade my mouth bent open” or “handfuls of sugar untouched in an abdomen.” I was fully articulated when you said this voice is changing, find me a new skin like my index was sound, like my blankest card said “surface worker.””
Dear Sister, If all stars are syllogisms,
“tell me what to say before I know what I’ve seen. You say we hum to make our names translucent, to keep the constellations moving. Call me “a bell to warn the birds” when a drift of one eye means enough letters for flight.”
Wondering why her shoes felt like skin
“she asked what animal left lines under her eyes.”
“We watched the scar on the palm of her left hand. The way / bleeding thumbs breed during sleep.”
Dearest Sister, Sugar is suffering somewhere in water.
“I’m thinking through a skin of wet cloth.”
Untitled, pg. 28
“you’ve been my sister / for a while now”
“she was / a winter’s worth of hum in / my ghost / birdbones / born / a lungful of cinders”
Dearest Sister, What is the difference between “an instrument of revision”
“laughing in the water lungs”
“as if wind were a form of eating”
Dearest Sister, Let’s not pretend there are no bad questions. (entire poem)
“Just because you’re halfway through the night doesn’t mean the world has to split down the center. When you showed me how to hold an umbrella upside down, gathering light, there wasn’t time to draw a new map, to talk me through another set of teeth. We’ve covered this ground before, the place between opacity and oracle in my library mouth. If I’m playing to the angles of an empty house, give me some feedback from your fleshed out shadows.”
If a sleeper moves into her own snow (for title also)
“name an ache in her covers”
When the somnambulist went back to sleep
“he did so with an incomplete knowledge of the incendiary vocabulary of snails.”
“The pain in my sheets won’t go away.”
Sorry for my absence of lines, my breath has tightened over two hours becoming helical enough to infest the exact scent of your spine.
“I am writing to you from the most public library in the world.”
The word moon got tetanus.
“She asked the difference between growing a beard and not shaving. I chose the latter and grass grew around my ankles. We spoke like matches in mirrors.”
“The line between astronomy and cutting the grass grew thicker every time we tried to remove it.”
I am building a body out of paper, splay, and splice.
“our dialogue is buzzed"
“You could shape my mouth to believe in the body”
There appears to be diagnostic friction in your amblyopia, your patched off flight.
“Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Anybody Speaking Words” (1982, acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas, 96 by 61.5 inches) is perhaps the best glottal stop for your repealed gloss, your nitrogen highness.”
Wondering why her skin feels like sand
“Flushed like a goose stumbled into flight. Flecked with buckshot.”
“Suddenly her water becomes unfair. Breaks simply in the bodies around him.”
Thanks for grasping the pigeons I sutured to your lining.
“I was trying to pronounce our science quieter than skin.”
“Everything I say is part sound rain. Half flayed iris. A flutter or umbra in the house of wound beginning.”
At first I was quiet,
“I use the word signal. You would sound so good beside my name. It is pictorial."
“You have strayed in my mouth for so long.”
At first you were miniature,
“The sun has been practicing those tiny flames all night.”
Dearest Sister, My most buried wires tell me we are thinking of the same fish.
“I could hear your oldest rain hitting the ground.”
Dear Birds, When you saw etymology as a swelling epicenter,
“my mouth cloaked in mumbling? You said hearing me talk was loaning flour to sugar.”
The somnambulist says the oldest swallow in his throat has finally gone aqua, (for title also)
“The say the quietest gesture is falling from a mouth.”
The to sound (entire poem)
“You are the one after end. The burned bird I woke up in.”
“Dearest sutures,
Sorry for my absence of lines, my breath has tightened over two hours becoming helical enough to infest the exact scent of your spine. Calling sunshine “a syntactically inferior form of transportation,” I was referring to the way your light splits my tongue in four directions, delaying the, causing an a in my
The public library is full of thieves who will not pay for how the earth reads their bodies back each day I am at a. I am thoroughly convinced I couldn’t, even if I. I’m not sure, even, whether my try at “I” is spilling off parts of itself as seed into the “I” you insist. Syllabic spread of musk the way a salve settles. Strange cut of sound I knew I could die inside, if I was truly alive. Dysentery as a way out of one’s own infectious waste? Quell me. Swell my. There are more problems of translation than we know how to eat. You write an I after negation to displace my scattered breath, to shake off every landscape, but what does it mean to correspond through glass, to continue a critique of accumulated angles. You’ve misperceived, in part, my strain. […] Forgive me for not specifying, but I am still raw from that momentary sinking. Dear hour of my birth, […] something green has hobbled my favorite tongue. […] I call it even nothing, because we are friends, and I know you will understand. Dear somnolent statue, […] I was trying to taste tone in the grains of your breath. Dear burrs incurred, There is never any need to anthologize. Especially to me. For I have gathered together all of my own loose singings, and they have stung me […] Grandfather, I asked, I never knew you too could wrap yourself so carefully in a napkin, could allow our mouths and leave out the cooking? […] To complete oneself by being sewn, arms spread, into someone else’s chest at your elopement of birth? To utter crushed chalk and mean it, even in the midst of inscribing your shame in the bone of her face? Still bone, central born, from which sound solidifies. From which an island inherits what’s offered in the foam of a whitecap? Snow skin, you suggest, as an eruption of thistle? Well, yes. Epigene. Epidote. Epigignesthai. But honestly, burrs incurred—what core for one might mask? The room without many mirrors retracts my name back into the single spinal nerve. And the old sting might be cave loss as sung. Dear abbreviated flock, […] I was trying to pronounce our science quieter than skin. To be awash in surface. The stretching out of chords. […] The arteries of am or spilled tongue of a. […] Do I really need a title to talk myself transparent. […] You are twice my projected image. […] A measure of rewound breath. […] You say the chest is a place just to step from, but I have found a crushed the in my lungs. […] But my detritus had already changed to dirt Dear dissident moth, […] our primary landscape is extinguished light. […] I was strewn in the aperture. […] Your endemic vocals have bled through my medicine. Said we begin threadbare and deaf, joined at the hip to dissonance. I am the docent and cinema of everything that lisps. Skimmed from a distance. Projector residue. A confluence of blurs. To lean against the most of our mouths and repeat three times, quite softly, how can Dear elapsed hands, I still and feed on your wringing. This landscape has overspelled me. I am scent and sores. and so I wheat but refuse to boom I have no ambush. No hunger to disturb. Nothing but birth-connected slats. […] Only a dismayed spain is pacific to my rigid cast. You say you felt residual in the wind we both burred. It is your flight that perfumes me. Form eating everything. Though I slake to body your manifest. Though I stomach the quietest gauge. I had to cleave so many of my fronds in the code. At crossed sites. I have no camouflage. No order to upset. I can no longer carry on in your shoulders. And so I sink. I sink and we are tarped under the same venn. I can no longer let you mirage my hearing. Consider this passage circled. I have only a removal, this flight, and my fallen gauze.“ — George Kalamaras and Eric Baus, “Births Incurred/your recently collected saliva”
Alina, You gave me this book right before I moved out to this dying city. (I'm feeling dramatic.) It's full of haunting images, stuff like the descriptions of magic items in video games, disconnected text with ominous and powerful names and abilities. The feeling of a world that might be a mirage, or one that only exists in the non-photographic flash of a particularly dreamy moment. These poems are comfort right now, these arrays of calm sentences full of ghosts. I want to join their company. Mondays.
"The Eviscerated River" appears in The Tranquilized Tongue (City Lights, 2014) text: The Eviscerated River The ashes on the banks reprised the pollen diffused in the city's soot. The blind spots inscribed in the organs of an iris ignited the bodies of bees. The stingers hovered. The blank space blinked. The speaker absorbed the view from inside the skull of a pulverized asp.
"This is the sign of a perfect listener. The look another not answering has."
Eric Baus, from "Tuned Droves" (octopus books, 2008)
