JAKE SYMBOL / 3 POEMS
I dream of cellphone towers in my prostate
I return home to mine fluids from myself. I return home to sweat foreign particles into my sheets. I’m somehow confident that the world, or its desirable sediments, will enter my channels and re-embody me, I will be reintegrated into the world’s circulation. Which world, this world, this dirt plane, this one neuron, this sweat membrane, this amorphous hive, this highway system, this motorized blood, with thickets but blocks, for some reason there is one authentic world and it’s the one that nursed my binaries, their fatty gradients. The world flows through the entirety of the world, or does it. My home is permeable, but permeable to what. I carry my waterlogged tissues from the elsewhere and touch their nerves to the textures of my gaping home. Salts accumulate on me in my sleep, salts become me. Did fluid come before permeability, I wonder. If so my time at home is futile. My home is not under water; my home is always something I have only a few seconds to understand, then something else. I tightly orbit the sound of my home, though my home is every other place, but I can’t hear them, though they threaten to completely reconstitute me.
One thousand dicks
The passing fields made a slurry of brown light. As time accelerated, my location became irrelevant. I was lying shirtless on the bathroom tile with a disposable ecig sticking out of my mouth. My trash crush sat on the railroad rocks reading Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. He stood out against the dead leaves and trees behind him; the air smelled sweaty.
Occasionally I would break from absorption and sense the muddy river sloshing outside the shell of summery percepts. Telephone poles whooshed violently past. I thought that I would have to understand the larger event encasing me, but kept rolling around inside the skunky aura of my hungers.
My slender brother was made of heat. I would sit on the docks over the river in the afternoon, not knowing of his existence, while he trotted drunkenly through the shade of the woods. Along the slopes of the valley sniffing for his future. A golden dog. My toes mixing the water, he fell on the train tracks.
I thought I was sniffing the crevices of the social for good art, but really I was basking in the redolence of my brother. Distended brother. I didn’t take the undercurrent seriously. I found him on Grindr, followed him on Instagram, DM’d him a few years later, opened the vector, he visited my basement apartment. When I touched him my fingers got battered by millennia.
One thousand dicks
Humid afternoon
Naked tumbling around the cog of moments
Uncut cocks sprout from the temporal streak
Versatile body horror
Outdoor gatorade shower
A car full of skaters drives past
Leafy binger
Fleshy river decoration dude-scent
Eagle face superimposed on space
Thirsty bird/genius
Pink ranger
I watch Sylvia Browne in a wet Pamper. The steam of mashed potatoes, the steam of American goulash. I leave sweaty palm prints on the playstation controller. Stick my finger in the defunct air conditioning unit in the backyard, recoil from electrocution. Dig a hole with my hands. Beneath an inch of dirt, find an orange spider. We have plastic toy rings in the house set with orange spiders, so I’m both surprised and unsurprised to find an orange spider.
As we sleep, Great Uncle Donny, now a shadowman, walks into my aunt Joyce’s room and stands beside her bed. She can’t move or speak. She attracts everyone dead in the family, and is named after her deceased aunt. Someone stands still beside the fridge.
someone has their fists inside her brain
she barks due to sourceless heat
that is not YOUR playstation
my body is mashed into being
I dreamed I had straight sex with Joyce and have had two dreams where I felt egged on to do sex acts with bizarre spiders. The pink ranger comes into my cousin’s bedroom at night. She doesn’t embrace her or do anything sentimental, nor does she do anything protective or retaliatory on my cousin’s behalf. My cousin has a lot of tattoos, says “fuck” a lot, knows what she wants. This is not toxic, and my similar traits are only incidentally toxic. We don’t identify ourselves as “survivors.”
US-23 howling behind the house
Her brain a nest for hostile hands
Nothing is immune to hostility
Jake Symbol is a poet and communist from Michigan. His work has appeared in TAGVVERK, Sea Foam Mag, Yalobusha Review, and the now-defunct Adult Magazine. His chapbook, ARTPORN (2016), is published by Citizen of the World. He tweets @JakeSymbol.