AUSTIN MILES

COMPOST

the great CHOPLAR
              black cat farm!

u:
all alone

the sound of houses

bleak + horrifying!

shapes around u come alive

world programmed

don't get caught in circles!
             the fresh + the new

zipped + clipped
             soft underside
of
             cold water / slight salt

             communal maybe

COMPOST

this place
reminds u

feel bad; live longer!                                |  stretch across
responses to the world programmed   |  the bluing arc

stretch across
the bluing arc
+ the ozarks
                                                     u amassed ur weapons system

up here—a blurry sky a soft wind—someone's footprints
             into the grass
u inspect ur weapons system
  lapping @ the shores

COMPOST

ultimately
more than doing

microprocessors getting faster cheaper
             invading homes!

worldwide
               +

[drink salt water]

someone's friend named lieutenant rich popeley

don't 4get about: dust

+ in the digital bioreserve
             they were trying to build something!

COMPOST

be trying to be natchure again
this land is weird
             doesn't work
plants sprout in sidewalks

getting on
the net
on a planet reeling
+ when the wind blew:
dust over chesapeake
                                                                   so far! so bittersweet!
                                                                   the apocalyptic smoke
                                                                   cutshort beans  pole beans  greasy beans
                                                     half-runner beans  lazywife beans  october beans
                                                                                 milkjugs + turtles

 gps coordinates:
tangier e.g.
 (a corpse that is still breathing)
+ crate art once painted

+ halt open-water dumping
             him as drunk

             thank u!

COMPOST

                                                                                             Pop. isle float
      like the authentic

water u see the spartina grass

u consider—
): a cold crystalline night

                                                                    when u go there
                                                                                  not able to tell self
                                                                                  from self
sand grains in the sandy road a leaning + plastic fence (buried in sand)—the wood posts in a way true wilderness in a way wind through the microterrain granular changes prompted by a big female breaching the fence nesting in the blown + sandy road in a way careless thought

into echoing waters when t. jeff. first
in 1998
the future is already awful

tho it wasn't enuf!

Austin Miles is from southeast Ohio. He's the author of the chapbook Perfect Garbage Forever (Bottlecap Press) and has poems published in Landfill, Sip Cup, and elsewhere.