In Eric Baus' poems, everything speaks. Baus renders the distinctions between animate and inanimate, human and animal, irrelevant. Sugar "suffers" as it dissolves in a glass of water. A shark preserved in a mason jar can still be "scared." Selves, never fixed, perform multiple transformations, often in a single poem.
Baus’ willingness to embrace these fluid selves draws me to his work again and again. There’s a space for me—genderqueer, resisting taxonomy—in these poems.
Because I’m fascinated by the sisters-who-are-also-birds in Baus’ debut collection, The To Sound, I’ve written an imitation of his poem “[I was thinking birds with extremely long necks].” In it, my speaker finds out they have a “secret sister” in the form of an intracranial teratoma.
When Justine Imagines Her Intracranial Teratoma as an Evil Twin*
by Jennifer Hanks
When Justine Imagines Her Intracranial Teratoma as an Evil Twin*
she irritates her body's a ball of moss leaking
"gag reflex" tucked inside her quail spittle
Misplaced
in her brain it became as human as it could
you're looking toothy shiny sister
creased portrait
a spongy locket of brain tissue
tending your germ layers a tiny, terrible
misunderstanding
she wishes for ring fingers the marzipan homunculus
sharp as paring knives shaved to almond slivers
Instead the sister parts
fine, downy hair
exposes a single lash-cloaked eye.
*Throughout, language is taken from the Guardian article "Teratomas: the tumours that can transform into 'evil twins'" by Aarathi Prasa.
Jennifer Hanks is the author of Prophet Fever (Hyacinth Girl Press). They were a finalist for Heavy Feather Review's Double Take Poetry Prize, judged by Dorothea Lasky, and have two chapbooks, gar child (Tree Light Books) and Ghost Skin (Porkbelly Press), forthcoming in 2016. Their poetry and nonfiction appear or are forthcoming in Arcadia, Gigantic Sequins, Bone Bouquet, HOUSEGUEST, and elsewhere. An associate editor for Sundress Publications, they live in New Orleans with their fiancée and tweet @corsetofscales.