[04/17/2026]

[POETRY]

existential chemistries

Five Poems by Austin Miles

Existential Chemistries

concrete habitat, my, instantiates several thoughts, one after
the other, in circular fashion. A white wall with mysterious
holes, faculty who don’t tip their hands, a janitor who knows
the score

the path to concrete is harrowing but arched over with
picturesque fall foliage adorning
         for instance, a sycamore and/or plane tree
against the blue background I struggle
            to conjure some feeling I kno I once had

                            do I really have time for this?
                            a general shift towards molecularities—

a feeling like I can’t think of anything — less or more
embodied, a good find on the street
stoplights, like thoughts, one after
the other

I get home and
architectural plants
adorn the furniture and
window sills

a cold ness , some blue
skies roll thru
pleasant conversation
always fails to last. really? a DUI?
no one responds to the whatsapp no one
responds to the discord no one responds to the
text no one responds to the email no
one responds to the phone call

if you want something you’d better already have it

ongoing production of visibilities

can’t make of the day something interesting. cannot rot it 
out sufficiently or satisfactorily. a fall fails to appear, for
    a        long time.   intellectuals gather to discuss           a
project. “If I could formulate a question that was a siren song”
     a graduate student says after first carefully thinking about
it.   A question to entice lusty grantors who can’t help but
    fund it

Time has no effect on the room where we gather. we
     “emerge” the same age as when we entered.
the room unchanging, the hours slip thru, around,

we draft our siren songs

a question can be infeasible here in our timeless room. “it is
simply impossible to ask that question”. it is in the wrong
    language. a question slips away unwanted, unloved
a question in the wrong place, does not entice

what’s going on outside? we can see time slip by. people make 
time happen. our room makes it not happen

multiple versions of Akron

Too much of anything @ all, throughout a week
     a key cannot be left outside of a room with
plastic office chairs with plastic wheels

                                        for instance. Because
of something no one talks. To talk would be, in the seminar
tantamount to snitching.

                                        “three ideas about Maine”

Can’t help but think that everyone is an asshole, as I ride my
bike. If that is true then so am I, I could not survive
otherwise

Everyone knows this. I continue into a brutalist daydream. Every
day I say hi to the people @ the front desk and climb the
stairs

amphetamine academes, I imagine, everywhere. My boots
sort of kiss the floor, announcing me.

a perennial lateness, which is the grounds for success. A
peer texts me, will you? or are you. I am, and I do
A professor is late to class, imperious discussion, a professor
accepts a call from a doctors office about a surgery

let’s stroll thru this conversation. acetate visions offer this
dim room. class leader says, I am guilty of crimes beyond
measure, but leave me my hokas.

A class ends but it never abates. As I ride a bike home I
lust after street food carts, esp. the gyro one’s. And
every double parker offers an ethical demand, a polemic,

that I’m in a room, which is thought, which contains me,
the world. I kind of conjure myself, mainly thru a memory

street legal nonfiction

a conversation goes extremely well
too      well
in a building w/o access — trustees have tastefully
renovated old brick w/ new gl     ass such that
a past becomes a present thousands of keys
jangle,    a professor laughs students
circulate. best sellers in Japan get read in
Pennsylvania.        someone says the clouds scud
(in a book) but they don’t

ice threatens my life and i
wish for a world w/o cars or
the corresponding pedestrians descending

from their cars.    A shirt for a university, hundreds of
free lunches truly free,
metaphysically
and bodily

porous beginning of today

warmth froths or   oozes over from Oklahoma—
        lottery games in a bar entrance bc  they
promise just a few seconds more,   every time
      I do not play them but I recommend
                                                                       to my
good acquaintance, play them

Blue moon rises
             from behind the bar. it’s miller time I
froth
             the moon refracts its demented sunlight logic
on all of the Atlantic coastal plain
             so someone drops their car keys and someone
else, trying to pull similar keys from
                                                                 their pocket
gets them caught on their wallet
     and fumbles around for a second like that

     after all that, someone deserves a
                                        bourbon barrel aged Christmas beer

the walk home takes place in a hallway
    lit by ceramic table lamps
every window looks out @ a dewy lawn, some
w old oaks, some w elms—

AUSTIN MILES is from southeast Ohio. He is the author of the chapbook Perfect Garbage Forever (Bottlecap Press) and has poems published in Moss Trill, Eulogy, Ballast, and elsewhere.