online
interspecies domestic life
a rock stands accidentally:
i’m in a room w/ u
chairs, a rock
soil
we get
in each
other’s way
deliciously
relations of
i am only a
thing made
of u —
in apt. depths
urinating
later we wash dishes
-
Austin Miles is from southeast Ohio. He is the author of the chapbook Perfect Garbage Forever (Bottlecap Press) and has poems published in Tyger Quarterly, Clade Song, Cobra Milk, and elsewhere.
for k, part 1
I know we are situated in this hour
stretching in all directions to every hour
at each moment I see us
and do not grieve like a dog I want you to fix
your attention here on me which is too much
I am not careful and I cannot suffer getting
what I ask for I am growing
a little fungus of revenge
and cannot wait to eat it
and let it rock through me and send me swaying
out there to where I cannot speak
or even salivate like a dog in high desert sun
I am dry and soft and slow
you are giving me freckles you’re burning me
-
Meagan Dermody is a Southern transplant writing poetry in the Midwest. Her work has appeared in zines including Emily Taylor Center's FEMINIST FRIGHT FEST 2021 zine and RABBIT, as well as literary magazines like PWATEM and Awkward Mermaid. A third-year MFA student at the University of Kansas, Meagan's work engages with trauma, ecosomatics, and the divine/grotesque/divine. She prides herself on being fun at parties and in the line at the grocery store, and is working hard to keep her aloe plant alive.
Another window can create or destroy. I figured out a voice is a pair of folded hands, from within the throat, strangled out of a white mouth (personified,) she hangs from the ceiling. This voice was something I found while digging into the wall. I'm trying to figure out who is with me in my house. A voice is a pair of clapping hands, folding out my window, folding with the cloth I hung by my bedside lamp for confusion.
This mouth is so white, I watch it weave little frozen bunkers out of scattered ribbons in the hair of my doll I found exploring the attic. She sits in the corner, frozen. (how they wove her together out of fornicating noises I don’t know. Probably from the many white tongues, and teeth from the mirror.) Folding replicas of dolls who once escaped the ceilings’ chandelier teeth; she is an odd Russian toy, she lets me repaint her chipped nail polish; refinish her chipped eyes, make the surface from the body of the house, dangling down as we sleep. She takes the surface there for hours; she hovers above our resting. Before dawn, I always go to the yard through the fog, I like to witness the old hallow– the silhouettes of junk haunt the ponds mist. I was touched in the head in my house, I realize. God's hand went through my body, into the center of my garden of tongues. The statue we found together (her and I) she found me looking older and beaten down. I heard somewhere in her soft whisper, something in the trees.
-
Fin Sorrel is the author of Caramel Floods (2017) and Transversal (2019). He is the founding editor at MANNEQUIN HAUS (infii2.weebly.com).
Refusing to Do Anything
Like a minnow
I can’t decide which school
to travel with. Maybe if I stay still
I’ll make friends with the bay
or ripples circling a water lily.
Most of my life,
six decades of busy.
I’m off to loll inside
a red tulip.
Yes, lolling is an activity.
Contradictions kiss.
A bee buzzes overhead.
I think his name is Death.
I’d
march into my old Bible Church
of Villa Park with my husband
and sit in the front pew
holding hands
as Pastor unpacks several
grocery bags stuffed
with shoulds. The church
sold to another church
and even that church died.
Real estate must give God
a headache. In my youth,
the same forty or so people
came each week, the same
ideas batted back and forth
like a badminton birdie.
What would they have done
to see us together?
Fenced us in with angry words?
Fenced us out with silence?
Church offered candles
and poison. It can no longer
break us. Or get in the last word.
-
Kenneth Pobo has ten books and twenty-eight chapbooks published, the most recent being Winbuds from Cyberwit.net. His work has appeared in: Amsterdam Review, The Fiddlehead, Hawaii Review, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Brittle Star, and elsewhere.
“I remember the day I was born.”
Ray Bradbury (b. 1920-2012)
The first time I ever saw a cloud at eye level, I was ten
like the back of Pelé’s Brazil soccer jersey. I left my small
third-world-country to go visit Mickey Mouse in Florida.
Halfway through our flight, I drank a Coca-Cola. I think it was a Coke
because we were flying on an airline owned by Howard Hughes.
Had it been a Latin American airline, I’d probably be sitting next to a chicken,
drinking a papaya milkshake, when suddenly, one of the engines would have stopped working.
Once we arrived in Orlando, I took a picture with Donald, Mickey and Pluto.
Those three creatures were so Nice (like the way you spell that French city)
that when I returned home, I stopped eating duck. I also stopped
feeding mice to my two cats, and I never kicked a dog ever again.
-
Steve Castro is the co-editor of Public Pool and the assistant poetry editor at decomP. His poetry has been recently published in Green Mountains Review, The American Journal of Poetry and in two anthologies by Wings Press (San Antonio) and Tia Chucha Press (Los Angeles). He was recently interviewed by the Poetry Society of America, Midwestern Gothic and the Chicago Review of Books (forthcoming).