Goatboy as a Perfunctory Symbol by Eric Tyler Benick

I eat my cereal like anyone else —
one leg at a time.

The gas lamps cringe
and the Studebaker’s cringe
and the sunrise is so annoyed
it doesn’t even bother.

I walk all the way to Passaic
just to find out
there is no Passaic —
that place is just some rich man’s joke.

I get fired from my job
scrubbing eggs
for ruminating too loudly
in the dining room.

Waiting for the train at East Broadway,
I am confronted by a cottonmouth
swimming through the noxious spillage
of the tracks. He takes me for all that I have
and kisses me sarcastically with his teeth.

Is it just me or did some bureaucrat
relentlessly beat the shit out of beauty
for over a hundred years
and drop it in our laps
saying this is all your fault,
fix it.

Is it just me?
Descartes said,
with a visible pantyline.

Some days the lead in Bushwick
is so potent that simply being alive
feels hedonistic.
I take my friend to Coney Island.
He tells me it’s his first time seeing the ocean.
It makes me so sad I buy him a corndog,
and a t-shirt with airbrushed seagulls on it.
Later, he holds me weeping at his wedding.

I do not uncross my legs like the fat Russian men
in the sauna. My secrets are a predilection.
I prefer them contained like young men in briefs.

The avenues leading to my door are all littered with snow.

I had half a mind to leave my home this morning,
but not the other half to return.

Eric Tyler Benick is the author of the forthcoming collection of essays, Softly, as if I Played Piano in the Dark (General Antagonism, 2022), the chapbooks I Don’t Know What an Oboe Can Do (No Rest Press, 2020) and The George Oppen Memorial BBQ (The Operating System, 2019), as well as a founding editor at Ursus Americanus Press, a chapbook publisher. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Southeast Review, Bat City Review, Armstrong Literary, Washington Square Review, Bodega Magazine, Birdcoat Quarterly, and elsewhere. He resides in Portland, OR.